Movie Masterworks

“I’m not asking much. Only to live a quiet life together.”

Synopsis: If To Live’s title, as Roger Ebert says, “conceals a universe,” then watching this engrossing, exhilarating and extravagant film surely reveals one. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and Best Actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival, this epic film from China’s most renowned director Zhang Yimou (Oscar® nominee for ‘Ju Dou’ and ‘Raise the Red Lantern’), unveils a world worthy of “a Chinese Gone With the Wind” (The New York Observer)! Set against four decades of Chinese political turmoil, ‘To Live’ follows the lives of one couple, Fugui and Jiazhen (Ge You and Gong Li), as they struggle to survive their own changing station within the upheaval. As the years go by, bringing bizarre twists, tragic losses…and profound hope, Fugui and his family persevere, striving to reach a calm within the storm so they can do the one thing they’ve always wanted to do: To Live.

Critique: “I believe that for a long time now Chinese films have been too abstract, conceptual, gimmicky. They don’t relate at all to the lives of ordinary Chinese people. I’m certain that most audiences will like this film. We haven’t gone overboard on the tragic elements, but rather have focused on the minute, amusing details in the life of a nobody. There are tears and laughter, one following the other in a gentle rhythm like the breath of a bellows.”

- Zhang Yimou, director of To Live

A script of such power demands actors of range and depth, which both Gong Li and Ge You are. Their total immersion into character is utterly convincing, bringing forth joy, laughter, understanding, humility and unbearable agony. There is also a real spark between Li and You, a sense of actual love - it’s impossible to understate the excellence of their performances. Huozhe is an extremely emotional picture but it’s the roles which bring tears, so devastating are the tribulations which weigh on them. For completion, the other players are fine, the sets and locations fitting and the sparse score appropriate. Huozhe indicates just what cinema is all about and why I love it so.

-Damian Cannon Copyright © Movie Reviews UK 1997

My thoughts: It’s been said life is a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs. Huozhe (To Live) mirrors this. During the quiet moments between the peaks and valleys it’s nice just to take a moment to contemplate. Near the end of the movie there is peace.

“Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within you, for those of you who know no tomorrow.”

Synopsis: Considered by some to be Akira Kurosawa’s greatest achievement, ‘Ikiru’ presents the director at his most compassionate — affirming life through an exploration of a man’s death. Takashi Shimura portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer forced to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days. Told in two parts, Ikiru offers Watanabe’s quest in the present, and then through a series of flashbacks. The result is a multifaceted look at a life through a prism of perspectives, resulting in a full portrait of a man who lacked understanding from others in life.

Critique: “Sometimes I think of my death,” Kurosawa has written: “I think of ceasing to be . . . and it is from these thoughts that Ikiru came.” The story of a man who knows he is going to die, the film is a search for affirmation. The affirmation is found in the moral message of the film, which, in turn, is contained in the title: Ikiru is the intransitive verb meaning “to live.” This is the affirmation: existence is enough. But the art of simple existence is one of the most difficult to master. When one lives, one must live entirely––and that is the lesson learned by Kanji Watanabe, the petty official whose life and death give the meaning to the film.

Personally (as I have indicated) I think it means that man is alone, responsible for himself, and responsible to the choice that forever renews itself. This interpretation has never been better put than by Richard Brown, when he wrote:

“Ikiru is a cinematic expression of modern existentialist thought. It consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when everything is said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task that to him is meaningful. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.”

-Excerpted from Donald Richie’s The Films of Akira Kurosawa, ©1996 University of California Press.

My thoughts: I can identify with Kanji Watanabe. What gives meaning to someones life? I hope, before the end comes, I can leave the world feeling that I’ve contributed to people’s lives. This movie, more than any other, can change your life.

“I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought, Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.”

Synopsis: Legendary director Ingmar Bergman creates a testament to the strength of the soul - and a film of absolute power. Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Agnes, torch red by cancer, transcends the pettiness of her sisters’ concerns to remember moments of being - moments that Bergman, with the help of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, translates into pictures of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.

Critique: The human journey is toward death. As God’s presence dissolved, the human person had to look elsewhere for some meaning in human existence, some hope to cling to in the face of death. Art offers hints of explanations, but without God’s animating presence and the superstructure of meaning that religion once provided for the artist, art’s “answers” can never be adequate. The only hope we have, according to Bergman, is human love. There is no heavenly hope. To make loving contact with one other human being or perhaps with many others is the only salvation available to us.

-Robert Lauder: In God, Death, Art and Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman

My thoughts: Cries and Whispers is a devastatingly cathartic film. This movie made me more cognizant of my relationships with those who are close to me. In the end, those are the relationships that delineate people who live rich lives from those living in a wasteland.

“Madonna, help me to change my life. Bestow your grace on me too. Make me change my life.”

Synopsis: Giulietta Masina won Best Actress at Cannes as the title character of one of Fellini’s most haunting films. Oscar® winner for Best Foreign Language Film, ‘Nights of Cabria’ (’Le Notti di Cabiria’) is the tragic story of a naive prostitute searching for true love in the seediest sections of Rome. Criterion proudly presents the restored director’s cut in a breathtaking new transfer.

Critique: The positive nature of Cabiria is so noble and wonderful. Cabiria offers herself to the lowest bidder and hears truth in lies. Though she is a prostitute, her basic instinct is to search for happiness as best she can, as one who has not been dealt a good hand. She wants to change, but she has been typecast in life as a loser. Yet she is a loser who always goes on to look again for some happiness.Cabiria is a victim, and any of us can be a victim at one time or another. Cabiria is, however, more of a victim personality than most. Yet even so, there is also the survivor in her. This film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene in which the story reaches a conclusion so definitive that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.

-Federico FelliniExcerpted from I, Fellini (1995) by Charlotte Chandler.Excerpted from I, Fellini (1995) by Charlotte Chandler.

My thoughts: I can’t help but root for Cabiria. Beneath a veneer of bravodo is a warm hearted human being who is completely vulnerable. Deeper still, is a person of great strength. Whenever I feel life has me on the ropes I remember the character Cabiria at the end of the this film for inspiration.

“Take care of your parents while they are alive. You cannot help them from beyond the grave.”

Synopsis: Yasujiro Ozu’s ‘TOKYO STORY’ follows an aging couple, Tomi and Sukichi, on their journey from their rural village to visit their two married children in bustling, post-war Tokyo. Their reception is disappointing: too busy to entertain them, their children send them off to a health spa. After Tomi falls ill she and Sukichi return home, while the children, grief-stricken, hasten to be with her. From a simple tale unfolds one of the greatest of all Japanese films. Starring Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, the film reprises one of the director’s favorite themes — that of generational conflict — in a way that is quintessentially Japanese and yet universal in its appeal.

Critique: Beneath the placid surfaces of Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema lies a persistent and despondent acknowledgment of life’s brutal brevity. Children grow up quickly, moving out of the house and starting families of their own, while the grandparents are left helplessly pondering their mortality in the vibrantly youthful personage of their grandchildren. As a result, these characters lead lives not in the pursuit of happiness, but simply in a flurry of activity designed to stave off thoughts of dying until the tyranny of old age makes it absolutely unavoidable. But while Ozu’s cinema doesn’t necessarily brim with reassuring themes, it is supremely life affirming for its brilliantly minimalist craft and gentle humanism. Comprising mostly static set-ups that highlight the director’s mastery of composition, Ozu’s films make up for their dearth of action with a wealth of subtext hidden in the silences. These are works that defy authoritative interpretation because they attain resonance through the outside emotional baggage brought to them by the viewer. Though his films are famously daunting for their long stretches of inaction, they are boring only to those who have never felt. In Ozu’s world, it is the audience’s point of view that is of primary importance, not the filmmaker’s, which is why his masterpiece, Tokyo Story (1953), is often hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. At the peak of his empathic powers, Ozu says more about life in that one movie than most artists can hope to articulate in their entire career.

—Clarence Beaks

My thoughts: After watching Tokyo Story, I called my parents just to hear their voices and talk about the weather. It was one of the last times I was able to speak to my mother for she passed away a few months later.