Movie Notes – Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Screening at the Detroit Film Theatre, 26^th November 2011, 2pm

Hats off again to the Detroit Film Theatre for their bold scheduling, which has seen a great selection of movies this fall. Next up is the Chantal Akerman masterpiece, Jean Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, (2005) a compelling work which chronicles the life of a widow, mother and prostitute in middle age, whose hours are dominated by routine. The routines by which Jean Dielman is enslaved become a framework for the cinematography, and through this technique the viewer comes to know something of the monotony the protagonist experience, providing a powerful metaphor for the feminist undertones of the piece. DFT summarises the piece as “a singular blend of feminism, modernism, and the avant-garde whose hypnotic editing and rigorous attention to detail make for a riveting, unforgettable experience.” There are no blockbuster emotional freebies with this film; it is uncompromising in its demands on the viewer, but the rewards are there for those who like something a little different from their night out at the cinema.

The Director – Chantal Akerman

Akerman is quoted as saying that she decided to become a film director at the age of fifteen, the night she saw Pierrot Le Fou, by Jean Luc Godard. Clearly a remarkable child, she enrolled in the impressively named Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion a film school in her native Belgium. Rebelling within her first term, however, she left and made a 13 minute long black and white film called Saute ma ville in 35mm format, which she funded herself, partly by doing administrative work. The film was premiered at the Oberhausen short-film festival in 1971 and Akerman’s film career took off from that point. She moved to New York where she became strongly influenced by the work of artists such as, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and, in particular Michael Snow. These structural film influences began to become apparent in her subsequent works, which became characterized by static framing and long takes.

The Movie

The plot for this movie is a simple one, following as it does the life of Jean Deilman (Delphine Seyrig), a middle-aged woman trying to get by. The routines that her life is dominated by provide the metaphor for her inability to break free from her condition, which consists of domestic duties, visiting her teenage son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) and being visited as a prostitute by her clients (Henri Storck, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Yves Bical). The clients’ visits are shown to be as routine and monotonous as all her other tasks, and yet, as the film progresses over a period of three days, Jean Dielman’s life slowly begins to unravel. Each change in the rigid routine is what one viewer described as ‘powerful and meaningful barometers of the titanic emotions going on behind her blank mask.’ Akerman forces the viewer, through her use of long duration shots and a refusal to use reverse shots, to enter the world of Jean Dielman in a very powerfully emotional way. Without engaging in her routines as viewers we cannot know the significance of their disruption and we cannot feel the weight of the ‘titanic emotions’ she is hiding. Discomforting as it may be at times, this certainly makes for intense engagement, which proves shocking at its climax.

Critical Acclaim

Jean Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was highly critically acclaimed on it release in 2005. The New York Times called it “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of cinema.” It was named the 19th-greatest film of the 20th Century by The Village Voice.

Should You Go And See It?

If you are interested in seeing ground-breaking films, then yes, this is indeed an important piece of work. As such it is challenging and demands your full attention for its duration, which is lengthy at 201 minutes. But without entering fully into Jean Dielman’s world, and experiencing the routines that govern it holding her together, you would be denied the experience of her unraveling. Akerman dares you to lose concentration, and every piece of dialogue and incident is rich with meaning and significance for the events to come. Delphine Seyrig is as beautiful as ever in the lead role, which she plays to perfection. For me, it’s a worthy finale to the fall season at the Detroit Film Cinema, and one you won’t forget in a hurry.

His first film was Following, an extremely low-budget (damn near guerrilla) film that made the festival circuit but never broke the mainstream. Then came Memento; it was unlike anything audiences had ever seen before. Insomnia, the Prestige, Batman Begins and the Dark Knight…Nolan is one of the most celebrated and accomplished contemporary filmmakers working today. His films are dark and sophisticated, complex and intense. He gets huge box office draw working with themes and structures that in any other hands would be considered too esoteric, too abstruse for the common (American) audience. His work is consistently critically and commercially successful, and yet he has succeeded in retaining his own unique voice in his films, his auteurism, despite the fact that he is now working from deeply within the Hollywood machine. Not unlike Hitchcock himself, really.

Inception is Nolan’s latest achievement, and in many ways it is almost an homage to his earlier work. Written, produced and directed by Nolan himself (as he has done with the majority of his films, save for the script for the adapted Insomnia), Inception is the latest entrant into Nolan’s spiraling world of colliding realities, multi-layered and ever-shifting. Here Nolan goes back to his basics: delving deep into the fractured minds of damaged men to explore their own delicate and imbalanced realities.

Inception is the bigger, glossier, more sci-fi oriented brother of Memento, which was more of a straightforwardly (though non-linear) psycho-drama film noir. But Inception echoes of Memento at every turn: a man whose entire sense of reality is in question, whose own memories can’t be trusted, who has lost a wife and is desperate to bring her back, even though he knows he cannot. Sci-fi action thriller or psychological mindfuck, the question Nolan is ultimately asking is this: how much do we lie to ourselves to preserve our own fragile psyches? Or, in a pedantic theoretical sense, if we construct our own realities how can we ever really know what’s real…and is there even such a thing?

It would be a mistake to compare this film to emotionally void yet visually stunning action flicks like The Matrix, though the multi-tiered layers of so-called reality make the comparison inevitable (Cronenberg’s eXistenZ also comes to mind, as does Sergei Lukyanenko’s concept of the Gloom in his Day Watch novels, in which each layer is increasingly more dangerous and unstable, threatening to claim its victims and make them forget their own realities). But what could have been just another frivolous summer blockbuster, a sci-fi companion to Ocean’s Eleven, is instead a fairly intricate character study.

Cobb – the name itself taken straight from the duplicitous main character in Nolan’s own Following – is an Extractor: he steals people’s dreams. Or, rather, he breaks into people’s dreams in order to steal information, a kind of high-stakes cerebral heist. For reasons that are revealed as the plot unfolds, Cobb (played coolly by Leonardo DiCaprio, with a hint at the inner turmoil about to bubble over) decides to take on a very risky assignment, one which promises to free him once and for all so he can return to his children: an inception, planting an idea rather than stealing one. He enlists the help of other professional thieves and scientists (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, and Nolan regular Michael Caine), and together they contrive a plan for inception which ultimately requires multiple layers of dreams-within-dreams, numerous faux-realities to construct, and increased levels of danger with every dream level traversed. But during the course of the planning and implementation of the inception, Cobb’s own destructive past is slowly revealed, making him a threat to himself and his team.

And this is where Inception fails: in all of Nolan’s films, each character is given a level of depth too little seen in mainstream films. Here, the characters simply are not developed enough for the audience to feel true empathy. The lack of development could have been salvaged by strong performances, but auxiliary cast members were forgettable (except perhaps Murphy, as the inception target), and our lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio – a fierce talent in certain roles – lacked the intensity necessary to carry the film. The audience does not feel the same self-deluding desperation that Guy Pearce gave us in Memento, or the same torturous obsession Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale exhibited in The Prestige, or even just the internal conflict of Bale as Batman. Nolan’s films are by trademark psychologically probing character studies, regardless of what kind of genre they’re packaged in; here it felt as if Inception tried to be both fully a mind-bending sci-fi thriller AND a quiet descent into the darkest depths of men’s minds…without ever really succeeding at being either.

The one exception here is Marion Cotillard, who plays Cobb’s deceased wife Mal (“evil”) who remains very much alive in his subconscious. Cotillard (whose delightfully wicked turn in Love Me If You Dare should not be missed) is exactly what she needs to be, playing the haunted memory of a troubled wife whose death Cobb is somehow responsible for. She is not a fully-developed character, nor is she supposed to be. Instead, she is a fully-developed obsession, a culmination of all of Cobb’s desires and regrets. She is angry, vengeful, and destructive. She is love and revenge. Her eyes are wild, a feral foil to Cobb’s attempted placidity, betraying his own turmoil roiling beneath the quiet surface. DiCaprio plays Cobb’s secrets discreetly, losing control only when at his most vulnerable – in his dreams, with Mal.

Another issue lies with the development of the Cobb character: his motivations are never really clear – or just don’t entirely make sense. By the end of Memento, it was clear that Leonard Shelby had actively made the decision to continue believing the story he himself created – that his wife had been killed when he was attacked and lost his short-term memory and he was trying to avenge her death – when it reality it was HE who killed her, he was Sammy Jankis, and he conscious mind could not accept what he had done so he continued perpetuating his own false reality in which he plays the avenging hero with a conveniently unreliable memory, leaving himself planted clues to the “killer’s” identity. Inception unravels here (SPOILER ALERT: SKIP TO NEXT PARAGRAPH): if Cobb were indeed still in a dream at the end, what is his motivation for staying there? In this dream world Mal is dead and his children are lost to him; if he could make the decision to descend to another dream level in which they were all together why wouldn’t he do so, if he were already choosing to stay in a dream as it was? A true Memento-era Nolan twist would have been that Cobb became convinced their world wasn’t real, killed his wife to prove it only to find out he was wrong, and decided to escape to a dream world in which she committed suicide instead. This begs the question: has Hollywood softened Nolan?

Nolan’s trademark devices are all in place: an eerily epic score that conveys as much emotion as the actors’ faces; softly-lit flashbacks of tender moments tinged with longing and regret; repeated refrains and images which seem innocuous enough at first until they gain a heavy significance as the plot progresses. But with his newly developed skills as an action film director, Nolan pulls out a gorgeously orchestrated piece of cinematic choreography as characters in a second-tier dream fight inside a rolling hallway, where all sense of orientation is lost and they leap from ceiling to floor to wall. Visuals such as the city of Paris rolling over onto itself are stunning, yet also oddly deemphasized. This visceral film is less about manipulating dream cities and walking on walls and more about navigating the realms of subconscious desires.

Though not quite as non-linear as its precursor Memento, Inception’s resolution is less clear, and less satisfying. No doubt this will benefit from a second viewing, but despite its flaws Inception is another solid example of Nolan’s quiet character studies delving into the darkest natures of man packaged in all the pretty Hollywood glitz to get popcorn audiences in the door and keep academics referencing it in film journals for years to come. A weak film from an auteur of this caliber is still a towering achievement over most others, and even if Hollywood has softened Nolan (or, more likely, forced him to soften himself), a film like Inception is still more daring than most other big-budget blockbusters. You may not get the emotional investment you’ve come to expect from Nolan, but he still does not disappoint the intellect.

Now playing in theatres everywhere.

While watching Paper Heart, I found myself wondering what exactly was the advantage of framing the film as a real-life documentary of the real-life characters who happened to be playing themselves in this fictionalized documentary about their real-life relationship (though not really ABOUT their real life relationship since they were in said relationship before the documentary was filmed and thus it is a fictionalized account of their real-life relationship). Did you follow that?

Allow me to explain.

Paper Heart is conceptualized as a “documentary,” following screenwriter/performance artist/musician/occasional actress Charlyne Yi across America as she seeks to find out what true love is by interviewing couples married for 50 years, scientists, children on a playground, workers in Las Vegas wedding chapels, divorce attorneys, and two leather daddies. The resounding pearls of wisdom echoed by nearly everyone she encounters is a maddeningly vague “You’ll know it when you see it,” making the “documentary” portion of the film a shallow effort, little more than curtain dressing for what is ultimately the “real” story of the film.

Charlyne admits to not believing in love and not really understanding what IT is; the idea is that, through the course of filming the documentary, she meets and falls in love with Michael Cera (playing himself as himself), and the “documentary” then comes to be about their budding relationship.

As a postmodernist by training, I can certainly appreciate the self-reflexive film which calls attention to its own construction and piles on multiple and almost indiscernible layers of faux-reality. This kind of multi-tiered play is a hallmark of postmodern filmmaking, and from the French New Wave to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off I always appreciate the attempt (even if the film itself is sloppy from a storytelling standpoint).

What I found so frustrating about the film is that it is never really clear what is real and what is fictionalized. Obviously there is much that is “staged”: cuts to camera angles that wouldn’t have been possible with only one camera; a smoothness of plot development and of conversational flow that wouldn’t have been possible if it were all “raw.” After some light Googling, an audience member might know that Yi and Cera were indeed a real couple and dated for three years, and that the relationship just happened to end in early July (a cynical audience member might wonder if the break up was a publicity ploy for the film). The film was shot in 2009, which means Yi and Cera were already years into their relationship, which means the whole conceit of making a documentary about love which accidentally became a love story about the writer is exactly that: a narrative conceit. The film is no longer a movie about unexpected love, but a movie about a movie about unexpected love—the love story is less the story than the story about the love story.

Officially termed as a semi-documentary, the interviews Charlyne conducts are real but the “character” interaction between herself, her director and friend Jake Johnson (played by actual director and co-writer Nicholas Jasenovec), and Michael Cera (in a role shockingly similar to every character he’s ever played) is scripted. But unless you knew this going in, you would spend most of the film wondering how much of the action happening onscreen is “real,” and how much of it is, well, a lie.

Oh I know, I know, there is no real, the very concept of THE REAL is constrictive, reality is only as reliable or as tangible as it can appear to be so, rendering both nothing and everything real, depending on your perspective…yes, I haven’t forgotten. But the problem with this kind of deceitful play is that it makes the audience feel exactly that way—deceived. In other words, if you want to make a mockumentary, make a mockumentary, and make sure people know that this is what it is. If not, the whole narrative becomes unreliable and the audience becomes suspicious; we no longer trust anything that the camera tells us because everything onscreen is suspect. Our entire focus shifts away from the budding love story and entirely onto whether or not the story is real, and to what extent. Essentially, Paper Heart is the modern-day romcom equivalent of War of the Worlds for an audience savvy and suspicious enough to anticipate such trickery.

Perhaps the conceit would have worked better with a cast of complete unknowns, but due to Michael Cera’s increasingly high profile after the success of Superbad and Juno, the film feels less like a cutesy indie romantic comedy which may or may not also be a documentary and more like fodder for the tabloids.

Furthermore, in their effort to continue to situate the film as being a film about a film, as the love story progresses the film starts to veer away from its constructedness, so even the filmmakers have a difficult time maintaining the film’s multi-layered identity. There are a handful of awkward scenes that intentionally call attention to the cameras that feel just a bit too tacked on—such as when Charlyne and Michael are talking and decide to leave the apartment and then Charlyne turns to the Jake (cue pan shot from a secondary camera to show Jake with his camera) and asks if the cameras should follow. To maintain the film-within-a-film quality, the audience must constantly be aware of the film’s constructed nature, but when the film decides it wants to be a narrative more than a documentary even the director himself has a hard time balancing the two.

Paper Heart was written by Yi and director Jasenovec, both with previous industry experience but neither with experience in a project of this scale. As a first-time feature for both (in all fields of writing, directing, and acting), the film very much feels like one still searching for its identity. As far as first attempts go, the film is funny, and endearing. There is a great deal of potential here for both Yi and Jasenovec for future projects. But as far as first attempts go, Paper Heart is every inch of one, with more artistic ambition than either person quite yet has the finesse to master.

Paper Heart opens this weekend in limited release.  You can catch it at the Birmingham 8 Theatre; check here for showtimes.

Sort of.

Let’s try this again.

Jerichow is an intellectualized exploration of greed and desperation.

Well, yes, it’s definitely that, too.

One more time.

Jerichow is full of surprises.

That pretty much nails it.

While it would be pretty easy, and also accurate enough, to sum up Jerichow as a loose interpretation of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice and the films that it inspired, it would also be a gross oversimplification of the emotional layers of the film. While Jerichow has much in common with the neo-noir genre from which the story was born, it also exceeds the generic tropes of the genre to become something much more intellectually intense, a film that speaks all at once about love, greed, betrayal, desperation, fear of death, fear of dependence, fear of abandonment, childish desires, and a longing for home (whether it be near or far). It is film noir transplanted six decades in the future and a full ocean away, set in a small, picturesque East German town where blue collar jobs have all but disappeared and the city is dying a slow death.

Jerichow opens with Thomas (Benno Furmann), a dishonorably discharged (for reasons unexplained) army vet who has just returned to his mother’s home, willed to him after her death. From this opening sequence the theme of money—who has it, who wants it, what one is willing to do to get it—is strong. Thomas’s former business acquaintances (of an unspecified field) are there with him, extending condolences and also a sincere regret that the money he owes must become an issue during this time. The way his former boss speaks to him is reminiscent of the sympathy and sternness one might use when speaking with a child who has done wrong, but who is otherwise a good kid whom you like and really don’t desire to punish. When the boss cleverly deduces Thomas’s hiding spot for his money—in a tin can in his old childhood tree house—it is clear that Thomas is being situated as a kind of child in this film; one whose behavior and perception of the world around him is child-like—simple, sincere, naïve.

Thomas soon meets Ali (Hilmi Sozer), a successful businessman in an area where the odds are against him, who also happens to have a fondness for drink. Thomas helps Ali out of a precarious situation, and so Ali offers him a job. It is through the course of his work that he meets Ali’s wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), a woman who initially treats him with nothing but disdain but who falls for him as he falls for her, in their equally wide-eyed, childish ways.

The basic plotline follows that of Postman fairly closely, until it diverges at the point of the murder plot. As Thomas enters their lives, he observes the strained relationship between Ali and Laura, and ultimately acts as a foil to them, providing an outlet for Laura’s domestic and internal frustration—or perhaps just acting as a playmate in this grown-up world of children’s games and children’s dreams.

Thomas and Laura are like a little kids playing games that are beyond their capacity to understand. They both hide money in places a child would, they run off to sneak kisses though always with the adrenaline-rush risk of being caught, and they plot a heinous crime as an extremist solution to an otherwise straightforward problem. They may be having sex, but there is little that is sexy about it—their sex is an act of desperation, of clinging onto a life they feel is rushing past them. Like children, they latch on to each other and refuse to let go. Thomas claims to love Laura though he knows next to nothing about her, and Laura later responds with “You can’t love, if you don’t have money!” Their understanding of the world is simple to a fault, the kind of naïve perception that one would expect from a child. Whether they are just shielded from or are completely oblivious to reality is never fully realized, though that reality comes crashing through loud and clear with the unexpected ending in which they must reap the consequences of their reckless trickster deeds.

Ali is the only character in the film who is portrayed as something of an adult, though even he is prone to child-like exuberance and overindulgence (such as the scene in which he channels “The Greek” from Postman when he dances drunkenly to Turkish folk music by the sea), and childish emotions (like his insane jealousy and suspicion of his wife, which causes him to follow her around town and beat her). Ali is otherwise a successful businessman who owns a nice home and has beaten life’s odds despite being faced with possible defeat at all turns, though he grapples with his own sense of displacement, feeling even well into middle-age like he is missing his sense of home, like he is living in a land that “doesn’t want him.”

With long looks and a sly thoughtfulness in his eyes, Ali may be a drunkard but he is no fool. He is much wiser to the world than Laura or Thomas who, despite their own tribulations, seem to never have fully developed into functional adults. But it isn’t until the end of the film, when Ali is faced with the imminence of his own death, that he seems to have a full understanding of life, and the horror of it. His final action is meant an eternal punishment for Thomas and Laura, that even though they got what they thought they wanted they must now live with the guilt for the rest of their lives, never really knowing who to blame and unable to seek forgiveness. Murder, as it turns out, is not child’s play.

Throughout the film, money is both a motivational force and a source of destruction. Thomas comes to town with no job, no money, and no work, and becomes dependent upon Ali for the money he pays him. Laura is equally dependent upon Ali and his money, after she married him and he absorbed her considerable (and unspecified) debts. Ali, in turn, is constantly on the lookout for people cheating him in his business, and is savvy to all their tricks as well as smaller strategies such as how to save money on gas while making deliveries. While the cast is very small—really only the three main characters—money plays the fourth silent role in the story. It is addressed in a way that is beyond simple greed; money here is a promise of independence, a new beginning, a source of betrayal, an act of desperation, a lifelong pursuit. These are not the kind of characters who rob a bank to get rich—they need, and want, and yearn, and they each conceptualize money as a means of achieving their goals. They are living in a post-Fordian economy which was in their lifetimes also still politically Socialist, and they are still unsure how to adjust. Ali, the only foreign-born character, is the only one adaptable enough to survive.

Much like a noir film, Jerichow is very quiet and minimalist. There are only three major characters, the settings are limited, the music used sparingly, the dialogue sparse. Much is communicated without words, forcing the audience to decipher the characters’ thoughts, actions, and motivations for themselves. It may strike a viewer as being emotionally detached from its characters or even intentionally elusive, but such determinations undermine the simple yet torrid raw human emotions that are the driving force of the film. Director Christian Petzold is not going to hand-feed you your analysis; he’s going to make you do the work yourself, but he gives you all you need to understand.

Jerichow is Petzold’s latest incisive offering, coming after his internationally acclaimed Yella. Considered by many critics to be one of the most talented and underappreciated filmmakers internationally, his films have a certain headiness that suit the arthouse crowd much better than a mainstream audience. Both leads, Furmann and Hoss, have worked with him on multiple occasions, and it seems obvious in their understated yet emotionally charged performances that this is a director who is able to conjure the exact kind of performance from his actors that his script requires, and they are more than happy to deliver it to him.

As a film, Jerichow is tight and controlled, revealing only as much as is necessary and at a carefully measured pace. The characters are each desperately searching for something—for independence, for home, for life. Deftly balancing a crime that is drained of its passion and replaced with something much more complex with a ground-level paradigm shift in global economy, Jerichow is indeed full of surprises.

Jerichow is now playing at the Detroit Film Theatre through Sunday, August 2nd. Check website for showtimes and ticket information.

I know that it is written somewhere in the top-secret handbook of film critics that you must give rave reviews to all foreign films no matter what, especially when that foreign film deals with a specific culture or practice that is scarcely touched upon (such as: goat herders inhabiting the steppes of Kazakhstan), filling some void in the cultural awareness of Americans via a limited-release foreign-language arthouse flick (and film critics love a good cultural-awareness-enhancing arthouse flick). And so I am aware that I just might be the only critic in the entire U-Ess-of-A who will openly say without hesitation that I did not like this movie, and I know this proclamation will draw gasps from the culture-fetishist arthouse types who feel that liking all foreign-language arthouse flicks, especially the ones about remote nomadic life, and calling the film things like “extraordinary” and “intoxicating,” is the hallmark of a distinctly cultured and intellectually superior person and to not agree means by direct proportion you are not as distinctly cultured and intellectually superior as those who clearly know better.

Yes, I am aware of this. All that being said, I still didn’t like this film.

Tulpan is the story of a young man named Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov) with dreams, big dreams. He was a naval officer and now he’s looking to get himself a nice little wifey and his very own flock of sheep to herd so he can have a nice little life on the steppes of Kazakhstan, and oh yes he’s going to be WAY more successful in this lifestyle than his poverty-stricken sister’s family, who are putting him up during his stay to fetch said wifey, because, you know, he’s got dreams. He doesn’t know a thing about sheep-herding and a live birth makes him gag, but still—he’s got dreams.

Our title character is the potential wife in question, who in turn has absolutely no interest in Asa nor in the fantasyland he concocts in which octopi are large enough to strangle a human and a man with no relevant knowledge can strike it rich living a nomad’s life. Bee-tea-double-u, we never actually see more than the back of the title character’s head. Which is fitting—that the film was named after its most elusive character—considering that the film itself is never quite sure what kind of film it actually wants to be; the name and its seemingly only tangential relationship to the storyline is representative of the film’s overall incohesiveness.

The film has no clear sense of theme or direction. Is it an ethnographic documentary? Is it a kind of love story (and only by the broadest stretch of the term)? Is it a coming-of-age tale, or a story exploring the delicate and often explosive nature of family? Well, it’s a little of each, and not really wholly any, which isn’t to say that a film cannot be more than one “thing”…it just doesn’t work here. Tulpan hints at weighty issues including but not limited to: poverty, a dying way of life, the importance of familial bonds, unrequited love, misguided ambition, the importance of self-discovery, and some other things. The ambling goofiness of Asa and his best friend Boni when juxtaposed with the much more serious and sincere issues that face sheepherders constantly on the brink of starvation simply do not mesh—the light-heartedness undermines the more serious tones and make them into a kind of joke, or at least make them seem, well, not all that serious.

It wants to be a love story, though it isn’t. Asa becomes hell-bent on pursuing the fickle Tulpan, despite her constant rejection, and who could blame her? The man courting her is whiny, annoying, and as Tulpan herself points out, has big ears. He is a wide-eyed dreamer convinced, much like arrogant youth can so often be, that he can follow the same path as his family but be so much the more successful for it. He is childish and naïve, lacking any sense of grounded reality. And in his worst moments, he is ungrateful, pig-headed, and insulting. I wouldn’t want to marry him either.

I realize that to draw such vivid characters as to evoke such a strong emotion from me, the viewer (in this case, extreme irritation) points to strong directing, dialogue, and acting. None of this is in question here. But how am I supposed to be rooting for this guy to win the heart of the modernly ambitious Tulpan when all I really want is for her to follow her dreams away from him and from the steppes of Kazakhstan? And did I mention that Asa is only “in love” with Tulpan because she happens to be the only available female around and his boss will not give him his own flock of sheep until he has a wife? Kind of sucks the romance out of it a little, doesn’t it?

But that’s only one element of the film. When it drops the goofy antics of Asa and Boni, the film drops Asa’s (and, by extension, Tulpan’s) storyline entirely, then focusing on the lives on Samal and Ondas, Asa’s sister and brother-in-law. In these moments, the film actually does become a quiet, tender portrayal of this vanishing nomadic way of life, displaying without over-sentimentalizing their constant struggle for survival and in the midst of all that, their strength and love as a family. But then it’s back to Asa and his asinine behavior, or long uncut shots of scenery characteristic of a geographic documentary, and the film gets jumbled once again.

Tulpan is the first feature film directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy (who shares writing credits with Gennadi Ostrovsky), whose previous films were small documentaries about small people with small ways of life. This feature is entirely in keeping with his repertoire; however, he hasn’t yet fully graduated from documentary to narrative, and Tulpan, like a newborn lamb unsure of its footing, is evidence of those first few shaky steps. Which isn’t to say he won’t get there—he just hasn’t yet.

In between subtle, simple, touching interactions between Samal, Ondas, and their children, Dvortsevoy intercuts lengthy, uncut shots of the desert, the windstorms, the sheep being herded…effectively halting the narrative flow each time. The film has no soundtrack but instead relies on the jarring, discordant sounds of a donkey braying incessantly, a high-pitched child’s voice singing off-key, and deafening windstorms to fill the soundtrack void during unnecessarily long scenes of a child running through the sands and clouds moving through the sky and wind blowing. Honestly this film could be watched entirely on fast-forward and would probably still be just as tedious, though it would be over twice as fast.

There is humor in the script, certainly, as there is also a certain amount of tenderness. Unknown actors essentially playing themselves give fine, understated, nuanced performances. Dvortsevoy’s filming style gives it a sense of documentary-like realism, but unfortunately, this is not a documentary but a narrative, and one that never quite fully gels. By the time Asa has his Big Awakening (which is the only point in time that the film falls prey to the romanticizing it constantly teeters on the edge of), I had entirely lost interest in him. While it would be easy to gush about the beauty, charm, realism, and cultural heritage present in the film, try not to get too caught up in the cinematography—which, in essence, seems to be the very mistake the director made.

Tulpan plays at the Detroit Film Theatre inside the DIA July 17th-26th. See website for ticket information and showtimes: www.dia.org/dft.

Séraphine is the story of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things. Séraphine Louis was a housecleaner in a tiny provincial town in France called Senlis. She was in her forties already when she first took up the paint brush, following the instruction of her “guardian angel.” Her work was a joke amongst the other townspeople, particularly those whose homes she cleaned and sheets she washed. But Séraphine kept painting, to the point of poverty and exhaustion, putting every last bit of money and energy into her work as her own intensely private way of celebrating her faith.

Eventually, and improbably, her work was discovered by art collector and critic Wilhelm Uhde (German actor Ulrich Tukur)—better known as the man who discovered Picasso. He was a known proponent of the “naïve” painters, an unfortunate term which refers to an artist’s lack of formal training but whose passion for the art is insatiable, even compulsive (and now a little more diplomatically called “visionary art”). Séraphine was ill-prepared for the money and attention that came with her sudden patronage, and eventually succumbed to her own ever-looming mental illness—the very one that likely inspired her painting in the first place. She died in a mental asylum in France, but her art, known under the name “Séraphine de Senlis,” is still considered a significant find in primitif painting.

Martin Provost’s film, based on this unlikely heroine and her even more unlikely circumstances, was the winner of seven Césars (the French equivalent of the Oscars), including awards for best film, best screenplay, and best actress, an honor that doesn’t begin to celebrate the tender, nuanced portrayal Belgium-born actress Yolande Moreau gives to the role of the simple yet impassioned Séraphine.

The film itself is merely okay. It spans two decades of Séraphine’s life in a way that is at times slow and meandering, at other times flashing forward so quickly as to be disorientating. The one saving grace of the inconsistent pacing is that at all points our heroine is doing the exact same thing: by day trudging to and from laundering clothes in the river and the homes she cleans, taking moments to sneak into the supplies store to buy varnish; by night painting with a feverish dedication as if possessed by the very angels whom she claims guide her.

What this film lacks is a more thorough exploration of Séraphine’s personal relationships with others. We see her treated as a dog by those she works for, and we see that she has some sort of friendship with the women of the local convent. We see her offering her prayers of devotion in church, and we often see her alone, trudging through the countryside or lying on the grass by her favorite tree. And we see her painting.

There is a brief building of her relationship with her patron Uhde, during which time she seems to express a sense of jealousy over Uhde’s sister (the familial tie unknown to her); this leads to an entirely unnecessary and distracting side story with Uhde which focuses on his relationship with a young painter named Helmut who was dying of tuberculosis. Why Uhde’s homosexuality became such an important factor in Séraphine’s painting as to require such a derailing emphasis in the film is unclear, and by that I mean it clearly wasn’t and did little more in the film that to halt the progress of Séraphine’s own story, one which I feel was not given the full attention that was due to it.

It isn’t until nearly the end of the film that we see Séraphine in a close friendship with another person; this young girl, a housecleaner named Minouche, seems to act in an almost daughter-like capacity, being both an admirer of Séraphine’s work as well as concerned for Séraphine’s welfare. Minouche becomes Séraphine’s confidante, and it is when she asks Séraphine if she had ever been in love that we finally see our heroine bud with romantic whimsy (something only vaguely hinted at, and perhaps only accidentally so, up to this point). It is sad that we do not see Séraphine in this kind of close personal relationship until so late in the film, and I wonder if it was simply to point out that she had no close friends (something which probably should have been emphasized earlier on), or if this is just an oversight of the script.

For much of the film, Séraphine is relatively silent. She has little opportunity to tell her tale and the film doesn’t waste too much time telling it for her. If the idea is that she is an ordinary person doing extraordinary things, it seems a bit of a back-handed compliment that the film doesn’t do much to emphasize her “ordinariness” other than to show her in one of two states: cleaning and painting. In fact, throughout the film the audience barely gets to know Séraphine at all, aside from her religious faith and almost-religious love of nature. Not from the script, anyway.

No, it is not through the story itself that the audience gets to know Séraphine. It is through Yolande Moreau’s aching portrayal of her. What the film doesn’t allow her in terms of dialogue, Moreau conveys with a lingering glance and the tiniest curve of a smile. With her outstretched arms Moreau conveys a rapturous joy; with her downcast eyes, a timidity that undermines her greater passion.

The story of Séraphine de Senlis perhaps deserves a finer film, but there is no finer actress. Moreau plays Séraphine with an understated complexity that only a truly great performer can convey—particularly with little speech to assist her. Moreau’s Séraphine is whimsical, naïve, audacious, gentle, obsessive, sincere, moody, perhaps a little slow, and deeply devout, with a child-like sense of wonder and awe and an equally child-like petulance, lack of responsibility, and secret craving for attention. Séraphine is not made out to be a beatific figure of divine inspiration and disposition; she is flawed, humble, and ordinary, just as every other “extraordinary” artist, despite their massive talents, is still just ordinary.

This is no story of a tortured artist, like other similarly single-named films about painters (Pollok, Frida, Basquiat). Séraphine is not driven by a drug addiction, sex addiction, or alcohol addiction (though she does like her homemade wine). She is driven by God (and a touch of madness), but not in the same way as the Italian Renaissance painters were, painting enormous and ungainly tributes to Christ and the Virgin Mother covering whole walls and ceilings as a celebration of their faith (or of the Church’s iron grip on society; either way); no, Séraphine is a lover of nature, and so paints vivid pictures of brilliantly-colored fruits and flowers that are almost macabre, seeming to reflect her own fragmented psyche, torn between ecstasy and inner horror. Her flowers, painted in colors she mixed herself with methods and materials she never revealed, look almost as if they wriggle with life; gorgeous pictures that could just as easily be of insects or fanged slashes of flesh as of the local flora, a psychotic landscape teetering on the edges of profound beauty and total madness.

Yolande Moreau finds this balance and displays it with heartbreaking authenticity. In her dowdy appearance and hunched-over gait we see her strength and humility. With her full smile we see a pure, undiluted joy, one that could make God Himself weep. With her angry, self-pitying outbursts we see a child’s over-simplistic and self-centered comprehension of things too big for her to understand. Moreau embodies Séraphine’s own psychological tug-of-war with gentility and honor; while the film itself is a little sloppy, Moreau’s performance is nothing short of extraordinary. While the film fumbles around with too many characters and too many side stories, Moreau is a quiet juggernaut. While Séraphine is a flawed film, Séraphine’s own flaws are brought to life with exquisite tenderness and yearning by the incomparable Moreau.

Séraphine plays at the Detroit Film Theatre Friday, July 10th through Sunday, July 19th. See website for showtimes and ticket information.

Day Two 

The Purple Gang

Rain Trailer 2 (SD) from Doug Schulze on Vimeo.

Rain, rain, go away…

No, really, please, do.

This eerie children’s chant is the opening theme for the film The Rain, directed by Michigan filmmaker Douglas Schulze, which had its world premiere last week at the second-annual Detroit Windsor International Film Festival.

And all I have to say about it is…wow. Just…wow.

The Rain follows the interwoven stories of three different generations in the small, drought-ridden farm town called Perseverance. The lands are dry, crops are dying, people are dying, the solution? Sacrifice some kids.

I suppose it’s all relative—as far as horror films go, this is hardly the worst. I mean, a far cry from the best, and barely staying afloat in mediocre, but certainly not nearly as campy and cheesy as films like Night of the Demons and the like.

But at least Night of the Demons is in on the joke—The Rain takes itself so seriously as to be laughable…and that’s not just for the bad acting, the stilted dialogue, or the premise so painfully generic and poorly executed it is an insult to the far superior piece of classic literature exploring the nature of men and morality, tradition and bloodlust, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

This film is a mess of motifs it can never quite settle on: water as both a giver and taker of lives (it heals sick people and kills healthy people? Is that the idea?), as well as a mode of transportation for the Max Schreck-looking character—whose very existence and preternatural abilities are never even remotely addressed, but rather just some extra spookiness thrown in for effect—and a top hat that is Evile Incarnayte. Oh, and did I mention that the basic idea is that the whole town is afflicted by a curse from an Indian shaman for stealing his land and murdering his children? ORIGINAL! Because Indians = SPOOKY! And what self-respecting horror film doesn’t have a good old-fashioned Indian curse?

The film also cheapens the themes explored in the story on which it claims to be based: what made Jackson’s The Lottery so bone-chilling was less the idea that people (of any age) were being sacrificed to ensure the continued prosperity of the community (which is in itself a stomach-turning thought), but more that the community had been doing it for so long that they may have fallen victim to their own potentially meaningless and wholly unnecessary traditions, and not one of them so much as bothered to question those traditions—THAT is what makes the story truly frightful. In The Rain, adults, afflicted with a disease only curable by the rain, sacrifice children in order to save themselves. Frighteningly selfish and violent, yes, but not on the same psycho-social playing field as Jackson.

And also, well, before the adults were sick they were just sacrificing children to make the rain come and stave off destructive drought and famine…but I suppose, in this great day and age of irrigation, that could no longer be a plausible excuse for infanticide so the writers (including director Schulze) had to come up with some other reason for the continued sacrifices.

Except that, only it wasn’t an issue when the Evile Incarnayte top hat was buried, but then there was still a drought, but before when there was a drought I guess some Indian guys approached the white men and were all, “Hey, we’ll give you rain if you give us your children’s SOULS,” and they were all, “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do…” I’m telling you, this thing is a mess from start to finish, and the loose ties that are supposed to link the three simultaneously-told stories just seem to jumble it even more.

Another thing, and this holds for any film that tries its hand at a novel approach to narrative story-telling: when interweaving three separate yet linked stories in order to tell one whole story overall, there needs to be some sort of consistency and narrative flow to the order of the three stories. For example, each sequence should in some way connect to the ones before and after it, perhaps explaining a portion (in this case, perhaps a backstory or a character’s motivation) of the sequence preceding it and then setting up the big reveal for the one that comes after it. What is should not do, and pay attention to this here, is take three different but loosely related stories, chop them up into pieces, and then reassemble them in a way that is jarring to the viewer and in no way contributes anything of value to the natural flow of the story (i.e., giving this Burroughs-ish cut-up format an advantage over a chronological tryptich-style telling). In addition to jumbled and inconsistent motifs, viewers were also treated with a jumbled and inconsistent narrative, one which never fully gelled in a way that explained, really, anything.

Except that the rain is bad. Or good? Or neutral? Guilt by association? Oy.

Let’s see, what else…hoaky? Have I used the word hoaky yet? Consider it done. In this presumably low-budget independent feature that relies heavily on child actors, it is of no great surprise that the acting is a little…bad. But the problem isn’t the children—it’s the adults. When dialogue isn’t delivered as if reading from a cue card, the roles are so overacted that I felt like I was watching Telemundo (minus all the good hair). The children are mostly okay, if a little wooden, and David Carradine…poor David Carradine. How the hell did David Carradine end up in a film like this? He glowered. And growled. And generally did his David Carradine thing (similar to a Clint Eastwood thing, only much more sinister…have you seen Kill Bill?). May he rest in peace, and may this not be his final film (a quick troll through IMDB says it’s not…*whew*).

I can’t decide if this is an example of a writer/director biting off more than they could chew, or if this is simply the work of—and I do hate to say this—an amateur. The film exhibits amateurish understandings of the horror genre and overuses genre tropes to the point of abuse (Music! Seclusion! Disfigurement! Disease! Screaming! Moaning! Rain! Blood! Forests! Nighttime! Indians! Kids! Top hats!).

I wanted to like this film. I really did. I hate panning a local filmmaker because (a) I always want to support the homegrown, and (b) there’s a really good chance I’m going to meet him professionally somewhere at some point and he’s going to ask point-blank about this review and tell me about how the film was 20 years in the making and how dare I call him an amateur and truth be told, I’ll probably deserve it, much as this film deserves the review I gave it.

The one saving grace this film has is that it occurs within a genre that is consistently poorly acted, written, directed, edited, and so forth. Again, in this particular genre, it’s all relative, and as far as entertainment value goes…yeah, I was entertained. Even if that entertainment came in the form of me thinking to myself, “How in the hell do these stories connect, and what’s with Nosferatu? How does he fit into all this? And, wait, are they sacrificing kids because they need the rain for their crops or because they need the rain for their illness? Okay, so first it was the crops, THEN the illness? And why isn’t the dad in the middle segment being healed by the rain? Why is he all disfigured anyway? Wait, is he Nosfertau? Wait, nope…no, Nosferatu was around in the first segment too. And why did the ‘50s mom die in the water when she was sick when everyone else was healed from it? What in the bloody hell…?” and so on.

Breaking Upwards Movie Trailer from Breaking Upwards on Vimeo.

We’ve all been through it before—the long-term relationship gone stale, the inability to let go, the struggle of the fear of being alone versus the continued misery of staying in a relationship that has passed its expiration date…we all know the drill. It is a painful and confusing fact of life for almost all twenty-somethings—and a romantic phenomenon almost exclusive to that age bracket.

Being in your mid-twenties is a confusing enough time in your life: your career has yet to solidify itself, you’re not entirely sure who you are or who you want to be; you’re using your parents as your role models and life guides though you’re slowly starting to realize that that they aren’t the paragons of maturity and smart decision-making you once thought they were; you’re still trying to figure out the Big Things in life (convinced that you can figure out the Big Things, anyway)…it is a tumultuous time under the best of circumstances. Throw in a four-year relationship at its breaking point for good measure, and what you’ve got is, well, a pretty typical life for a 25-year-old.

Or what you’ve got is Breaking Upwards, the narrative feature film debut of director/writer/actor/producer/editor Daryl Wein. What started as an experiment between him and his real-life long-time girlfriend, Zoe Lister-Jones, became fodder for an effortlessly clever and heartbreakingly true-to-life film which tracks the fictionalized couple Daryl and Zoe through one year of jealous rages, immature tantrums, hypocritical tirades, lies, deception, confusion, irritation, impatience, passive-aggressive power-struggles…in other words, a pretty typical relationship for a 25-year-old.

Daryl and Zoe, realizing that their relationship has hit the proverbial wall, decide to make their break-up an experiment. They realize that while they can’t live with each other, they also can’t live without each other (or so they think: relationships tend to be a little more life-or-death dramatic for the twenty-something set). Instead of breaking up, they decide to take “breaks” in order to slowly wean themselves off of each other until they finally feel comfortable enough to fully break up. Certain days they aren’t allowed to speak, and they set parameters on their behavior which eventually leads to them being allowed to date (and sleep with) other people.

If it sounds like a co-dependent meltdown waiting to happen, then you’ve clearly been through something like this before. This little experiment is wrought with raw insecurity, vulnerability, and self-aggrandizement. While the one thing these two characters need is space away from each other, it is to each other that they both keep turning back (when their faith and trust in their own parental models is shaken by what they assume, in a way that only the arrogance of youth can, is a lifetime of poor decisions that led to long-term unhappiness) for guidance and support through their own break-up. It is hard to tell whether what they have is love or co-dependency, though so often one is easily mistaken for the other.

Yeah, I’ve been there. A few times. More than I care to admit. I think we all have, and I think the real question here is at what point are you healthy enough to be in a relationship that is no longer co-dependent? Or perhaps, at what point do you become mature enough to realize that all relationships become comfortable and worn-in eventually—that in time, the passionate lust and mystery fades—and that what seems “stifling” at age 25 might be marital bliss at age 50?

What I love about this film is that it doesn’t really try to answer these questions. Despite being an incredibly smart, savvy, articulate exploration of twenty-somethings in crisis, it never really takes itself so seriously as to act like it has all the answers (a fault of many other films by/about twenty-somethings). In its exploration of emotional immaturity, the film is incredibly sympathetic and mature. It is raw, and it is real—a romantic comedy for every relationship that hasn’t had a happy ending. It is not a symptom of its Gen X, Gen Y, or Gen-whateverness; it is just a simple story about real people experiencing real hurt, and having to suffer the pains of youth and growing up (via breaking up).

Casting themselves in the roles of the main characters based on their own experiences, Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones deliver equally remarkable, tender, real performances that never once seem stilted, scripted, or staged. The dialogue is snappy and witty, almost rapid-fire in a way that is less self-important Linklater and more irreverent Seth Rogen. The actors feel entirely natural, which struck me as an impressive feat considering that the leads are relative unknowns and are reenacting in a way that seems almost masochistic their own relationship’s end. Expertly shot, scripted, and edited, this humble indie project could just as easily be the product of a team with decades more collective experience…but it probably could not have approached the delicate emotional vulnerability, the loneliness, the youthful authenticity of Wein and Lister-Jones.

Examining the many varied power-struggles experienced by people in their twenties—within the confines of family, work, relationships, and the gender double-bind—while also being a very real portrait of very flawed people, Breaking Upwards is perhaps this century’s most poignant and realistic look at relationships, done with an unflinching yet compassionate eye. This is one of the best romantic comedies I have ever seen, even moreso for the fact that the sticky-sweet happy ending so common to the genre was shunned in favor of an ending that a whole lot more real people can actually relate to.

Wein could very well be on his way to becoming the next great auteur, among the ranks of Robert Altman and Woody Allen. I look forward to seeing what is next from him, as well as his luminescently-eyed, f-bomb-dropping ex-girlfriend Zoe Lister-Jones, without whose articulate and sensitive performance the film wouldn’t have been the same.

Imagine a Japan in which Godzilla and Gomera still exist…the catch is, people no longer care. Imagine also that to fight these oversized beasts, select men are chosen by the Monster Defense Bureau to be electrocuted into a larger-than-life size (don’t ask for the scientifics behind that). Imagine still that these fights are filmed and broadcast live on local TV—at roughly 2:00AM and with abysmally low ratings. Big Man Japan, the brain-child of writer-director Hitoshi Matsumoto (who also plays the title character), is a wonderfully absurdist frolic through a modern-day Japan still plagued with the oversized monsters of its kaiju heyday, with a cheeky self-aware quality that both sends up this old monster movie genre while also paying homage to it, and making our ne’er-do-well protagonist both an object of humor as well as one of sympathy.

Daisato (Matsumoto, one of Japan’s top comedians) is a nobody. A slacker who can’t keep a job or a wife, Daisato is neither a dynamic nor a terribly interesting character—except for his terrifically interesting line of work. Daisato is “Big Man Japan,” just one in a long line of men (including his father and grandfather) chosen to fight these alien monsters and defend Japan against their invasion and destruction. The film we watch is the interview footage taken of Daisato and the people in his life, as well as footage of his battles. The interviews with Daisato (or, “Big Sato”) are rather boring—lengthy, uncut shots of him stuck in one awkward pause after another, with nothing of interest to say. The narrator tries valiantly to make his interviews more compelling…but with little success. Big Sato, aside from getting big and fighting monsters, is actually kind of a loser, not to mention rather boring

Despite the fact that, in the beginning, the audience is somewhat encouraged to laugh at this hapless man, Big Sato becomes a sympathetic character as the film progresses. Caught in a completely absurd world in a profession that is widely disrespected, Sato is simply trying to make the best of it—to take care of his ailing, senile grandfather (“The Fourth” in his family’s line of Big Men) and to provide from a distance for his estranged daughter and philandering wife. The whole thing becomes almost heartbreaking—shlub that he is, he still tries his hardest, and gets no thanks from those he supports in his family and the many more citizens of Tokyo he protects (they only accuse him of wasting electricity and ruining their property, as told by the graffiti found on the walls outside of Sato’s home and over the electric plants he frequents to get “juiced”). The world is ready to write him off as a relic of a former era, one with no purpose in this modern world and little more than a social nuisance.

It wasn’t always so. Sato reflects on the days when there were many in the Big profession, hearkening back to a time when Big Men were praised and respected—here we see echoes of Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles (which itself has faint echoes of Watchmen), when the superheroes were killed off or forced into hiding, and no longer were respected by the people they protected, complete with “newsreels” of the glory days. Yes, Big Sato is the last in a long, proud line of Big Men, but their era has come and it is he who is left fighting a battle that no one—not the public, not the government, not his family, not even his agent—even considers relevant anymore. The public is more eager to rise up and cheer against Big Sato at any given opportunity (a fight he loses brings in his highest ratings) than they are to support him.

There is a tinge of sadness here that comes with this sympathetic character falling victim to the shifting tides of public opinion, but this film is ultimately a comedy, loaded up with bizarre monsters and even more bizarre situations. A lengthy scene of “the ritual” (leading up to Sato’s transformation) is endcapped with numerous people involved in it calling it completely unnecessary (with the added irony of shooting a retake for the camera). The monsters themselves are a collection of absurdist delight, from the Strangling Monster with the comb-over to the Stink Monster who engages Sato in an absurdly normal conversation. While oftentimes the comedic tones of a foreign-language film are, well, lost in translation (so to speak), Big Man Japan offers an almost slapstick and also very dry humor that translates easily into any language, whether that be in Sato’s impassioned insistence that no sponsorship should be placed on his hips (cut to: his four-story hips, plastered in sponsorship) or in the perfectly-framed shot of him normal-sized standing in his Big-sized purple briefs awaiting transformation (a big purple tent with teeny-tiny legs).

The graphics are cheesy and bad, but this is also part of the film’s humor, playing off the comically bad special effects of the old kaiju monster movies. Big Man Japan is nothing if not excruciatingly self-aware, and it is this self-awareness which enables it to be an astute social commentary, a comedic homage of a classic cinematic genre, a deceptively clever mockumentary, and a fairly straightforward underdog tale…all at once.

Following in the tradition of classic mockumentaries like This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show (and really anything else from the Christopher Guest cannon), Big Man Japan takes such real-life absurdism and transcends it into this literally larger-than-life universe where the fantastic is simply mundane. Big Man Japan is a breath of fresh air in a cinematic climate that is too often stale. It is definitely…odd…but that’s what also makes it great. It is a freakishly funny triumph for first-time writer/director Matsumoto, on the level of writer-comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat. In the end, you’ll root for Big Man…or, you won’t really be sure what you’re rooting for, but at least you’ll be having fun while doing it.

Big Man Japan plays Friday, June 26th-Sunday, July 12th at the Detroit Film Theatre.  See website for details.