Chime
The Serpent’s Path/La Voie du serpent
Cloud/クラウド/Kuraudo

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi

The average cinephile would certainly be forgiven for not noticing Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s relatively long absence from filmmaking to open this tumultuous decade. After his perpetually underrated Wife of a Spy played in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2020, he didn’t put out another film for four years, his longest break since 2008 (Tokyo Sonata) to 2012 (Penance). In the haze of the pandemic and its attendant complications, it’s only natural that even a steady artist like Kurosawa would fall out of view. Still, the slow roll-out of announcements—beginning in April 2023 and concluding in February 2024—that he would be releasing three feature films in the calendar year was one of the more delightful phenomenons of the past few years.

The groundswell seemed to stem from a variety of impulses: the excitement at his return of course, the surprise at this heightened degree of prolificness (Hong Sang-soo was inevitably invoked). However, there was perhaps just a little bit of relief. Following a run of, in the eyes of the many who still view Kurosawa as “merely” one of horror cinema’s greatest exponents, unconventional films—Before We Vanish‘s alien invasion, To the Ends of the Earth‘s odd travelogue, Wife of a Spy‘s period intrigue—the announcements of first a remake of Serpent’s Path (1998), one of his final V-cinema efforts, then the explicitly supernatural Chime, and finally the suspense thriller Cloud seemed to herald something of a return to form.

Ironically, the timeline of the films’ respective availability has been jumbled and uneven at every turn. The 45-minute Chime premiered in a sidebar at the Berlinale and, thanks to its botched release from a NFT company, became available via extralegal means a few months later. Though The Serpent’s Path technically premiered second, receiving a full-fledged theatrical release in Japan in June, it was completely unseen in the West until its competition berth at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and has only received a scant few festival showings in North America since then. Therefore, Cloud, the final film announced and premiered from this trio, has received much greater attention at an earlier time than its predecessor, thanks to a Venice out-of-competition slot (where it was commonly cited as being better than a number of the actual Golden Lion hopefuls) and a well-attended TIFF premiere. And, as has been frequently mentioned, none of these films currently have U.S. distribution.

I say all of this not only to catalogue the strange journey that related films, especially Kurosawa’s—lest we forget that Journey to the Shore, an Un Certain Regard prizewinner and NYFF Main Slate entry, never got an American distributor—can take in the currents of the festival circuit, but to point at what might be called a certain interchangeability between these three works, all of which are strong and distinct in their own ways yet ever-so-slightly lesser than the majority of his more recent work. I watched these earlier this month—in an appropriately mixed-up order: The Serpent’s Path, Cloud, Chime; I’ll be discussing the films according to the order they premiered—and throughout I couldn’t help but think of how my friend Evan Morgan, one of the smartest critics I know (especially on Kurosawa), remarked to me that, after seeing Chime and knowing about the two films to follow, he felt Kurosawa was entering a more retrospective period after more than a decade where “everything seemed new and open to infinite possibilities,” an assessment which is, for better or worse, largely accurate, or at least indicative of a somewhat more straightforward conception than his previous predilection.

Chime, despite its short running time and novel setting, is ultimately the film that adheres most closely to this paradigm; it is also the strongest of the year. Kurosawa is by no means new to working within the span of an hour, but these works—including “Beautiful New Bay Area Project” and Seventh Code, both from 2013, and his short “Actually…” from two years ago—have typically, due to a combination of their status as commissions and their more free-floating narratives, allowed Kurosawa to play in freewheeling fashion with genre and tone. Chime, by contrast, is almost perversely committed to its evocation of the dread that has been his most widely beloved mode for so long, which is to say that this is paradoxically a continually surprising film narratively without the unexpected shifts of many of his other, even better works.

True, Chime generates an immediate frisson from its main character’s work: the antiseptic teaching kitchens, besides uncannily reminding me instantly of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros, are much more orderly yet oddly reminiscent of his typically dingy environs, with all the cold reflective metal and knives a sure harbinger of the violence to come. The familiar elements don’t only appear at work; viewing this in close proximity to Tokyo Sonata, the family dinners here bear a marked resemblance, only streamlined and stripped of all but the most essential elements. When the premise first came out, many compared it to Memoria, but besides there being surprisingly little of the actual chime (much more akin to wind chimes as opposed to, say, the sound of a ringtone), it is more than anything else an externalization, a reminder of all the potential evil surrounding us.

Especially at this early juncture, it’s too reductive to say that Chime is the most successful of Kurosawa’s films this year merely because it sticks closest to his strengths, which lie both in sustained mood and in the various means by which he teases out his characters’ madness: the overflowing box of cans that the chef’s wife is dumping out at one point, the nighttime sojourn to hide a body, a disastrous job interview caused by the chef’s manic inability to get out of his own perspective. It’s probably unlikely that this scenario could sustain a film much longer than this one, especially considering the coda: a sudden burst of (emulated?) film grain that calls to mind Kurosawa’s recreation of 9.5mm film for Wife of a Spy, the exact right frenzied note to end a uniformly thrilling 45 minutes. Chime is direct about its intentions and executes them in the right manner, which for a craftsman of this caliber is kind of ideal.

In a certain sense, it’s convenient for referential purposese that the remake of Kurosawa’s 1998 film appears to be formally titled in English The Serpent’s Path, though I wonder how much of that comes from the direct translation of the French “La Voie” (not “le chemin” as originally reported). Such a small yet focusing element describes this take on his original material well. For me, if it is not quite the best of this trio, then it’s certainly the most fascinating. In broad strokes, The Serpent’s Path operates as a tremendously faithful remake of Serpent’s Path, following a grieving father as he, with the help of a much more implacable accomplice, kidnaps and tortures men who he believes killed—unlike in the Japanese original, molestation is never mentioned—his daughter.

Of course, the film takes place in Paris, featuring the great French actor Damien Bonnard as the father, and represents Kurosawa’s second film outside his native country after the French film Daguerrotype. His helper, replacing the bespectacled male math teacher of the original, is a female doctor played by Shibasaki Ko, who speaks impeccable French and in certain ways represents a combination of characters from Serpent’s Path, including an enigmatic gang leader who served as one of the main antagonists. The original has long been noted for its overwhelming bleakness, a pitiless examination of abasement that equally makes sense amid his direct-to-video work and coming right after Cure. The Serpent’s Path, at least in my view, does reach a similar height and, in terms of Kurosawa’s expression of his interests, surpass the original, but it doesn’t necessarily aim to do so via its atmosphere.

The dingy, enormous warehouse is replaced by more discrete, still dilapidated rooms reminiscent of a soundstage; the 80 minute film is expanded out to almost 2 hours without seeming to add too much in the way of plot. Rather, The Serpent’s Path works more slyly than the other two films put together when viewed from the lens of adaptation. Most obviously notable are the scenes with Nishijima Hideotoshi (the lead of Kurosawa’s Creepy, which featured Serpent’s Path star Kagawa Teruyuki) as one of the doctor’s patients, who has lived in France for many years without ever learning the language: his signature weariness mixed with charisma as he talks about his persistent migraines and growing dissatisfaction with his life communicates a great deal about a dislocation faced, in one way or another, by all the characters.

Kurosawa’s ability to evoke modern alienation has always been one of his most significant tools, and it’s further bolstered here by one of the most striking changes. While many sequences are replicated virtually identically, down to a few perfectly copied visual choices like a tilt-up as the first captive looks up at the father, the film invokes the idea of a corporate conspiracy which led to the murder much earlier than the hints given in Serpent’s Path. Both films are, at their core, about a paranoiac struggling to establish a motivation for the havoc he is wreaking, but The Serpent’s Path introduction of a more coherent throughline trades Serpent’s Path‘s haze of confusion—signified by the copious use of complex math problems—for the brutal, cold light of digital and two-faced interactions enabled by late capitalism and ostensible good intentions. Ultimately, my preference for The Serpent’s Path may simply lie in the sheer novelty of seeing Kurosawa directing Damien Bonnard as he torments Mathieu Amalric and Grégoire Colin, but the fullness with which he delves into his newly revitalized premise, even if it lacks the focus of Chime, is truly chilling.

It might be something of an anticlimax to end with Cloud, even though it’s a very worthy film in its own right and already, deservedly, has plenty of champions. Like Chime, it’s a film that, despite the noted shift from suspense thriller to quasi-action shootout, is relatively direct about its intentions and interests, and “merely” sets about executing them with great vigor. Much of the coverage around the film has revolved around its apparent updating of Cure and especially Pulse for a more depersonalized, bland Internet age; it might be too harsh to say that these comparisons are more reflective of Kurosawa’s still underseen body of work and therefore Western critics’ limited understanding of his cinema, but, a few potent scenes of our antihero as he waits for his scalped goods to sell out on a flickering reseller website aside, this is much less a film about the actual apparatus of technology than human interactions under duress.

Eric Marsh compared it to Doppelganger, which I haven’t seen, but, perhaps because of the compressed preparatory viewing I undertook for my own week of Kurosawa, it oddly reminded me most of Serpent’s Path‘s sister film Eyes of the Spider (also 1998); for his part Filipe Furtado cited The Revenge films (I’ve seen the first and can see the resemblance), which also belong to Kurosawa’s V-Cinema works. Though Eyes virtually begins where Serpent’s Path leaves off—starring Aikawa Sho, the helper in that film, as a man seeking revenge for his daughter’s murder—it quickly becomes something of a yakuza comedy, tracking the drudgery of a hitman’s life in a vague, nonsensical hierarchy; though there is plenty of bloodshed, it is dealt with in a fairly lightweight manner.

Cloud only involves the yakuza tangentially, in terms of the implied connections and past that the reseller’s assistant possesses, but it feels of a piece with Eyes of the Spider in its approach to violence and the numbing consequences of economic manipulation, especially once the reseller and his girlfriend move to the countryside and all the problems they hoped to escape are multiplied tenfold. Kurosawa’s staging of the action scenes, which reminded me of the wonderfully absurd shootouts in the very different Before We Vanish, is very clean and dynamic, playing up the cavernous desolation of the warehouse (as opposed to the disturbingly tidy warehouse in The Serpent’s Path). Ultimately, the inexorable grind of moneymaking keeps moving, encapsulated in the use of one of Kurosawa’s best recurring formal devices during the final moments: obvious rear projection during driving scenes, which he once described as aiding the sense of transformation caused by the resulting conversations. Like its two similarly brilliant brethren, it’s clear that something akin to an apocalypse is fast approaching; while most of my favorite Kurosawas don’t end on such an unambiguous note of pessimism, there’s still not much as compelling as his cinema, whatever running time, genre, or form it adopts.

Courtesy of Sideshow/Janus Films.

New York Film Festival 2024:

Caught by the Tides/风流一代/Fēngliú yīdài

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Jia Zhangke

Throughout his filmography, Jia Zhangke has refused to operate within clean dichotomies. Whether it be the tumult of his prominence and corresponding governmental approval—where Jia has alternately been censored or praised by the Chinese Communist Party depending on whichever film he’s made at a particular time—or his approach to form, his work is at once instantly recognizable yet always shifting according to his own predilections. Certain periods can be picked out: the opening stretch of his career lasting until 2006, his documentary period from 2008 to 2010, his genre-inflected epics from 2013 to the present. But such divisions are porous: Sean Gilman’s essential “14 Ways of Looking at Jia Zhangke” piece for MUBI Notebook provides a handy précis into his influences and tendencies, which course through these different periods, popping up at unexpected moments. Along with his wife and muse Zhao Tao, Jia’s filmography has been defined by his continuous charting of the currents of a rapidly modernizing China, with all the recursions and great leaps forward implied in such an artistic undertaking.

That being said, Jia has always retained the element of surprise, each new entry to his canon a left turn that expands the expressive potential of his cinema. The past four features alone have vividly demonstrated this: the mosaic of violence in A Touch of Sin, the futuristic decades-spanning melodrama of Mountains May Depart, the dedication to the gangster film in Ash Is Purest White, and the enormous evolution in his documentary abilities shown in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue.

And yet, Caught by the Tides, Jia’s first fiction feature in six years, registers as the most extreme leap since possibly Unknown Pleasures, precisely because of how much it may superficially resemble virtually all of his past films. When it was unveiled through the slow trickle of production updates and the announcement of the Cannes competition, all initially seemed normal. Like Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White, it was specified as a film taking place in three time periods over the course of a few decades; in particular, the idea of featuring Zhao Tao as a woman searching for her romantic partner hearkened back to the latter’s narrative. The central conceit of reusing footage in order to evoke the era in which previous films of his had taken place was intriguing, but didn’t necessarily register as something new, and most reviews have conveyed a sense of the film as largely resembling his recent period. Mountains May Depart‘s first section was in Academy ratio specifically to allow for this incorporation; meanwhile Ash Is Purest White begins with such footage and interlaces it throughout, and focuses on the same time periods as Caught: 2001, when Unknown Pleasures was filmed in Datong; 2005, corresponding to Still Life and decamping to the Three Gorges Dam-affected Fengjie; and the present day, back in Datong.

Any consideration of a film so deeply entrenched in its filmmaker’s oeuvre almost demands a more personal recounting of the writer’s relationship with said body of work. To be honest, as I was reading the logline and early reactions, I was a little bit worried that Jia was repeating himself: Mountains May Depart remains one of the most personally important films to me, and Ash Is Purest White is wondrously complex, but I was unsure if a third iteration would be sufficiently generative. Even as I saw the rapture with which numerous trusted friends received it and felt more at ease, it was still difficult to fully let go of that doubt. The extremity of my reaction may indeed be influenced by an equal sense of relief and awe, that the most important filmmaker currently active had found yet another way to completely overhaul his aesthetic interests. It probably doesn’t help that Unknown Pleasures and Still Life are among the haziest Jia films for me, and I didn’t have the time to revisit them before seeing this.

At its core, Caught by the Tides is not merely about the complicated romance between Qiaoqiao—though I actually don’t remember if Zhao Tao’s character’s name is said in dialogue—and Bin (Li Zhubin), despite the general tenor of the critical conversation thus far. Rather, it exemplifies in the best way “a documentary that is progressively overtaken by fiction,” as Jonathan Rosenbaum once characterized Jacques Rivette’s Out 1. Where that legendary masterpiece was conceived as fiction from the outset yet initially presented as detailed vérité, Jia’s method of reusing footage shot over the years, usually during production—I have heard conflicting accounts, though the general consensus is that these are by-and-large not outtakes or alternate takes from Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, but rather moments and scenarios captured on set, with apparently some sequences taken directly from those films—takes that appellation at face value, both in its own conception and in its unfolding.

Then again, that idea might apply better to the Jia referent that, in many ways, feels more apropos to Caught by the Tides than his recent work: the docufiction hybrid 24 City. That film, mostly presented as plain documentary, gradually introduced actors into the mix of factory worker talking heads, including Zhao and Joan Chen, until virtually everything presented on screen was thrown into question. His other best work explicitly invoking documentary, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, was, like Caught by the Tides, co-written by Wan Jiahuan, and involved a similarly intricate structure to 24 City that Caught largely avoids, though these two latest films by Jia share a sense for Chinese historical context and its influence on art. But that film possessed little of the slipperiness that 24 City and Caught present, with the latter film magnifying it to extreme, pervasive proportions.

For much of Caught by the Tides‘s extraordinary achievement rests in the way in which it manages to question every single scene that appears on screen, even as they frequently register with a grand jubilation. After an enigmatic opening shot, the first of many intertitles appears on screen, displaying the lyrics to an unusually (for Jia) raucous rock song, before plunging into an extended, seemingly documentary sequence of Datong villagers singing in a room. Zhao is not present—and indeed does not appear for a while—as Jia lingers on the different impromptu performances. Soon after, there is an extended interview (it sounds like Jia’s voice is asking questions off camera) with a man who is opening an entertainment hall; it becomes clear later that Zhao is one of the women who ends up working as a singer there, but the insertion of this talking head into the proceedings, especially with his brief discussion of a Mao portrait that he recovered while refurbishing the building, throws the already odd focus into complete uncertainty.

Caught by the Tides is, frankly speaking, likely Jia’s most impenetrable film, even as it likely contains the greatest musical spirit of any of his works. It willfully follows its own paths, barreling into the images and sensations of the past without leaving an easily identifiable breadcrumb trail behind. But this comes across as a specific aesthetic strategy, an series of acts of incorporation that, for perhaps the first time since his greatest film Platform, fully emphasizes both the individual and the collective. The Chinese title roughly translates to “romantic generation,” and both it and the English title convey the sweep of history, the way in which an individual moment can suddenly be incorporated into a larger understanding of a people or, indeed, a relationship.

To emulate this idea, Jia’s approach in this first section (and, to a lesser extent in the second) is to only fitfully emphasize Zhao and Li’s connection. One of the Jia films I did see in preparation was “In Public,” his documentary short and first digital effort, shot directly before Unknown Pleasures, and there is a surprising amount in Caught, including a bus converted into a restaurant, as handy a synecdoche for Jia’s reuse of his footage as any. Switching rapidly between Academy ratio to 1.85:1—note that the digital video-shot “In Public” and Unknown Pleasures were both released in the latter ratio—and even incorporating what may or may not be new footage of Zhao (given a notable increase in resolution), the primary sensation is of being unmoored in time, existing somewhere between the immediacy of the past and the nostalgia of the present. In one of the most apparent manifestations of this, frequent Jia actor Liang Jingdong pops up in the 2001-set opening credits, looking much more like his current age, before having a small role in footage clearly shot in 2001. At one point, his character falls asleep in front of a computer, and an animated digital reverie reminiscent of Zhao’s dream in The World adopts a different mood entirely. This first section is full of such ruptures and wonders.

The second section hews closer to what I remember of Zhao and Li’s half of Still Life, but that categorization might not be right at all. If I’m not mistaken, I believe that most of Zhao’s footage is actually taken from the shoot of Ash Is Purest White‘s second section, which somehow recreated Fengjie circa 2005, was shot on 35mm by Éric Gautier, and involved Zhao looking for her partner in that film. There appears to be film grain (assuming it’s not emulated) and the image quality is generally much higher than Li’s scenes, as he was not involved in Ash. While there are fewer cutaways to “purely” uninflected observation of non-actors, the same confusion involved in the first section extends to this questioning of where and when each shot exactly came from, suggesting the understandably discombobulating idea of a woman from 2017 attempting to connect with a man from 2005. At one point, an animated English-language advertisement for robots (allegedly created by AI) plays on a celluloid film projector as Zhao (in I think a 2017-shot café) looks on, only further muddying the waters.

On its face, the third section, set in 2022, provides little of that same uncanniness. The immediate impression is left by the clear aging on Li’s and even (to a significantly lesser extent) Zhao’s faces, as well as the throes of the pandemic. It’s likely that Jia, shooting a year later, had to recreate yet another crisis in China, albeit on a significantly smaller scale and with much less time to be bridged. The narrative intrigue rests mainly in the search for reconnection, but Jia still finds ways to disorient: a few uses of a 360 camera here, stretching and pulling the image; a sublime encounter between Zhao and a serving robot there. But the effect, after seeing all this change and confusion, is to suddenly reorient the viewer, snapping all of the tumult into focus and observing the wreckage left in its wake. Qiaoqiao is on better footing than Bin, but the resignation caused by the intervening 17 years and the mostly unexplained events of that time send the film into another level of inchoate emotion entirely.

To bring it all back to 24 City: while that film was fundamentally grounded in the reality of the factory, even as the viewer’s conception of what constituted it evolved, Caught by the Tides exists in a realm where there is no foundation imposed by the film. It is a film where narrative, both intrinsic to the narrative and informed by the viewer’s expectations, struggles to be born from the “documentary” footage. Zhao’s dialogue-free performance, as luminous as any instance of her legendary work with Jia, acts as a binding agent as always, and it’s worth remembering here that her given name (as mentioned in Mountains May Depart) means waves. Chinese society and Zhao produce their own tides of change, and Caught is, by the end, equally beholden to both of their forces. It is too much to say that the former represents documentary and the latter fiction; indeed, for us Jia devotees Zhao’s face is a primary document of an evolving China. Instead, with regards to a new landmark whose meaning changes with each passing moment, altering both itself and its towering predecessors before it, it’s best to simply marvel at such a bursting work, one whose voice rings out at last with a clear sense of a new beginning.