おくりびと Okuribito

Ho sempre avuto una grande passione per i film che parlano della morte.

Lo so, la frase può risultare particolarmente macabra, ma non lo è. Così come, in realtà, non sono macabri i film che trattano questo tema. Anzi, per quanto possa sembrare strano, spesso sono film traboccanti di vita. La morte mi fa paura, certo, ma questo non mi impedisce di volerla conoscere più da vicino, nei limiti del possibile. Non a caso, la mia serie TV preferita di tutti i tempi è Six Feet Under di Alan Ball, che come molti di voi sapranno è la storia di una famiglia che gestisce una funeral home a Los Angeles. La morte è molto, molto presente. Perché queste persone, con la morte, ci campano: ogni puntata inizia con un morto, ci sono cadaveri che vengono preparati per le veglie, e cari estinti che parlano con i loro parenti. Ma tutto questo non impedisce alla serie di essere travolgente e pulsante di vita

Ho sempre trovato molto inadeguato il rapporto del mondo occidentale con la morte, e considerato i popoli orientali mille anni avanti rispetto a noi nella gestione del gran finale. Qualche settimana fa ho visto in DVD un film giapponese che ha confermato le mie convinzioni (sia sull’ottima qualità delle opere che parlano di morte che sulla superiorità degli orientali nel trattare questo tema). Si tratta di Okuribito di Youjirou Takita, vincitore quest’anno dell’Oscar per il miglior film straniero. Il titolo significa, letteralmente, colui che accompagna. 

E’ la storia di un giovane violoncellista, Daigo, che si ritrova da un giorno all’altro senza lavoro (l’orchestra per cui suona chiude improvvisamente) e decide di ritornare a vivere nella sua cittadina d’origine, insieme alla moglie, in cerca di fortuna. In questo posto un po’ sperduto del Tohoku, per la verità, il lavoro scarseggia e, dopo molti infruttuosi tentativi, Daigo finisce per accettare un posto in un’agenzia di pompe funebri. Ma non una qualsiasi. Si tratta infatti di un’agenzia che pratica il Nokanshi, un’antica tecnica secondo la quale il corpo del morto viene letteralmente “preparato” davanti ai parenti. All’inizio perplesso e quasi disgustato, Daigo a poco poco finisce con l’appassionarsi al suo lavoro, soprattutto grazie agli insegnamenti di Sasaki-san, il suo capo, un signore taciturno e discreto, che con la sua gentilezza e la sua compostezza riesce a conquistare ogni famiglia (l’attore che interpreta questo ruolo è il grandissimo Tsutomu Yamazaki, che forse qualcuno di voi ricorderà in Tampopo di Juzo Itami). Daigo dovrà affrontare non pochi problemi per far accettare agli altri (sua moglie per prima) lo strano lavoro che ha scelto, ma in un modo o nell’altro tutti dovranno arrendersi all’evidenza: a Daigo lavorare con i morti... piace da morire!

Questo film è una vera delizia (unico neo, forse, il finale leggermente mieloso), ed è un condensato di tutto quello che amo sfrenatamente del Giappone e dei Giapponesi: la discrezione, la compostezza, l’eleganza nei gesti, la parsimonia nelle parole, la delicatezza nei propositi, l’amore per la bellezza (che si traduce in ogni cosa, persino nelle tazze in cui bevono il té), l’ironia sottile, l’understatement un po’ naïf, e la dignità come valore assoluto. Non so se state pensando ad un paese e un popolo che sono esattamente l’opposto...

Il modo in cui i cadaveri vengono lavati, vestiti e truccati di fronte ai parenti contriti dal dolore, è un momento di umanità cosi alta che si fa quasi fatica a guardare. Inevitabile pensare che in Occidente una cosa del genere sarebbe impossibile. La prima volta che Daigo affronta da solo la prova del Nokanshi, si trova in una situazione che ne è l’esempio perfetto: mentre sta lavando il corpo di una ragazza, si rende conto che c’è “qualcosa” che non dovrebbe esserci. Preso alla sprovvista, mantiene la calma ma riesce a catturare discretamente l’attenzione di Sasaki-san, che sta supervisionando, e a sussurrargli all’orecchio le parole “ha quella cosa...”. Il capo, con altrettanta discrezione, prende il suo posto, finisce il lavoro e poi, rivolgendosi con estrema gentilezza ai parenti, domanda: gli occhi, di che colore li volete truccare?

 Da cui risulta evidente che è molto, ma molto meglio morire da trans in Giappone, che non nel nostro paese.

Ne approfitto per ringraziare pubblicamente il mio amico Giorgio Amitrano (il miglior traduttore di letteratura giapponese che abbiamo in Italia), al quale devo la visione di questo film (e di tanti altri che un intero post non riuscirebbe ad esaurire): arigatou gozaimasu, sensei!

n.b. Ho scelto di farvi vedere il trailer giapponese perché è molto più bello di quello "confezionato" per gli occidentali. Se volete, su You Tube trovate quello sottotitolato.

The cinema of Andrea Arnold

How many special movies do you have the chance to see, every year?

I mean, very special ones, movies able to change your perspective on something, able to move something deep inside you, to leave you breathless and speechless? Not many, as far as I’m concerned.

In these last years, I’ve seen two movies by the same film maker that had such a big impact on me and I’m very happy to write that the man behind the camera is… well, a woman.

Her name is Andrea Arnold.

Born in England in 1961, Arnold won an Oscar in 2003 for her short movie Wasp. She wrote and directed her first feature film, Red Road, in 2006 (winner of the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and part of the Advance Party project created by Lars Von Trier) and this year she’s been back with Fish Tank (winning again the same prize at the same Film Festival).

Arnold’s stories are very bleak. They are set in bleak places around UK and they talk about bleak people: not happy, not rich, not particularly beautiful and very often traumatised by some not-very-funny event.

So, I know what you’re thinking right now: why on earth Zazie is telling us to go and see such depressing movies? Well, it is because these movies are not depressing, are just great.

Red Road tells the story of Jackie, a Glaswegian CCTV operator, a lonely and sad woman in her 30s who spends her life watching other people’s lives through the monitors, until the day she catches a glimpse of a man and this seems, somehow, to change her life dramatically. I’m not going to tell you who this man is or why he is so important for Jackie: if this movie’s atmosphere is so fascinating, it is mainly due to this mystery. You don’t know anything about it, you desperately try to understand why she is doing what she is doing, and you’ll be aware of that just towards the end. Red Road is a very dark and very slow movie but there is a fire burning inside it, and you can feel it since the beginning. This woman seems dead, inside, but she is not. You are touched by her fragility, fascinated by her willing to pursue her idea (wherever this will lead her) and when you finally find out what’s going on, you just want to cry for the rest of the movie. In Red Road there is one of the strongest and most beautiful sex scenes I’ve ever seen on screen and, I know half of the population will disagree with me, but I think this is because there’s a woman behind the camera. Ok, I wrote it. And I take full responsibility for that.

 The main character of Fish Tank is, once again, a woman: Mia is a teenager living with her single mother and a younger sister in a dingy housing estate somewhere in the south of England. The only thing she really enjoys in life is to dance all alone on hip-hop tunes. At school she is a disaster and her relationship with the rest of the world is quite dramatic: no friends (her bad temper and bad manners don’t help) and no chances to be supported by her mum (kind of an alcoholic). Something changes with the arrival, in their apartment, of Connor, her mum’s new boyfriend (played by Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender, whose arrival would change any woman’s life on planet earth).

Mia, who spends her time defending herself against other people and the world outside, by meeting Connor (probably the first adult who seems genuinely interested in her as a human being), opens up to new feelings and new hopes. Things won’t turn very well with him, in the end, but the process has started, and a new phase of her life is spreading in front of her.  

Supported by an outstanding cast (newcomer Katie Jarvis, found by Arnold while furiously fighting with her boyfriend on a station’s platform, English actress Kierston Wareing, already appreciated in It’s a Free World by Ken Loach, as Mia’s mum, and the above mentioned Michael Fassbender, by far the best actor of his generation), Fish Tank is a vibrant, emotional story.

There are at least a couple of perfect moments: every time Mia finds herself close to Connor and this simple contact produces in her a physical upsetting (like a crack in the fish tank she constantly feels trapped in) and the dancing scene between Mia, her mum and her (irresistible) little sister.

Maybe they’re desperate, maybe this world is a shitty place to live in, but everybody has the right to hope and to look for bliss.

Remembering Heimat

20 years ago today, the Berlin Wall was falling down and this historical date is rightly celebrated everywhere in the world. Zazie would like to give her small contribution in the only way she knows: talking about cinema.

One of the most amazing experiences of my entire life, has been the vision of a German movie called HEIMAT (an apparently untranslatable word that somehow means "Homeland") by Edgar Reitz. To define Heimat a simple movie is very, very reductive. Heimat is an epic, and a very long one. We are talking about 52 hours of filming material divided in 30 episodes, split up in 3 parts: Heimat 1 (11 episodes), Heimat 2 (13 episodes) and Heimat 3 (6 episodes).

Heimat is the story of a German family, the Simons, from 1919 until 2000, but it is also the story of a country. I've been lucky enough to see Heimat 1 - A German Chronicle on the Italian TV around 1985/1986 and I loved it. I was captured after 10 minutes by the adventures of the Simons in this remote little village called Schabbach (in the Hunsruck area of the Rhineland). 

The first Heimat follows them from 1919 until 1982, and it's easy to understand how many stories can be told based upon such a rich historical period: the end of the First World War, the Second one, the years of the Nazism, the post war period, the economic boom, the heaviness of the '70s etc. etc.

The second part, well, that was one of the highlights of my youth. I still have to understand why, but in Italy someone (up above that loves us) decided to distribute the movie in cinemas and in Original Language!!! (a mystery that will probably never been solved in a country where, even until today, every single movie is dub). I was living in Milan, at that time (1992), and the cinema showing Heimat 2 used to screen, every week, a new episode. I remember that they had created a lovely special card for the movie and every time I went to see a film they obliterated a piece of the card, filling me with joy (yes, I know, I'm a bit crazy). I also perfectly remember how much I was crying when I got off the cinema after having seen the last episode. It was a summer day and I was desperate, walking in the empty streets of Milan and looking for a reason to live without the Simons (at that time, I didn't know that Reitz was preparing the third part of the saga). 

The only other fictional family that had such a big impact on me was the Fisher family of Six Feet Under, but this has been just few years ago. The Simons were the forerunners! Anyway, Heimat 2 - Chronicle of a Youth is the story of the youngest Simon, Hermann, who leaves Schabbach to move to Munich in the '60s to study musical composition. Arriving in this city, he meets new friends, he falls in love with the cellist Clarissa (and he tries to forget his first love, Klarchen, a Schabbach woman), he takes part in the new artistic movements, he discovers a new way of living and of being.

We are talking here about a real masterpiece. Not all the episodes are perfect, but most of them are. Every single character is beautifully created and defined, the dialogues are intense, as well as the flow of emotions that overwhelm the screen and the audience. About the way all this has been filmed, Reitz uses a simple but powerful idea: the day scenes are filmed in black and white, while the night scenes are filmed in colours. I can't explain you better, but this basic solution is to die for. The amazing thing about Heimat is this: the story is probably the most "German" story possible, but it is incredibly universal. In Heimat 2, for instance, there is an episode called "Kennedy's Children", that shows what happened to every character of the movie the day Kennedy was killed. Once got home, after seeing that episode, I asked my parents if they remember what they did in that particular day and they both answered Yes, we do. Every single person of our generation remembers it. You see, Reitz is maybe talking about some Munich guys but he's talking about the world. 

And I'll never forget one scene, where one of Hermann's friends has been to see "La Notte" by Antonioni and says, with dreamy eyes: you watch a film like that and you want to kill yourself (La Notte is my favourite Italian movie of all time). Not to mention the poster of Jules et Jim in one of their rooms...

Heimat 3 - Chronicle of a Changing Time begins exactly with the fall of the Berlin Wall: it is in that same night that Hermann and Clarissa met each other again, after having lived apart for many years. Heimat 3 was out in 2004 and the momentary cleverness of the Italian distributors was over. I was living in Genoa, at that time, and after a couple of episodes, they decided that the experiment wasn't worth it (probably the fact that we were 5 in the cinema for the first two episodes didn't help). Sadly enough, I've never seen the rest of Heimat 3 even because, I have to confess it, it was not as good as the first two sagas.

I really hope that somebody reading this post will feel the urge to re-discover this movie and I also take advantage of this public space to ask for forgiveness to all my German friends to whom, invariably, my first question is: Have you seen Heimat? followed by my incredulous-almost-disgusted look if they venture to answer No.

I read somewhere that Heimat was one of Stanley Kubrick's favourite films. Well, if you don't trust Zazie... please trust good old Stanley, guys!

The Australian 400 Blows

Last week, I went to see the avant-première of an Aussie movie at the Cinéma du Pantheon: Samson & Delilah by Warwick Thornton (the movie won the Caméra D'Or, the award assigned to the best first feature at the last Cannes Film Festival).

I have to confess it: I’m in love with Australian cinema.

I think it’s a real pity that not many movies from Down Under are distributed in Europe and I think it’s a pity that the few Australian movies arriving in Europe are not exactly the best representation of their cinema industry. I mean, Australia by Baz Luhrmann is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in my entire life and the country he’s showing there is a mere cliché. The real Australia is somewhere else, for sure.

In the four years I’ve been living in Paris, though, I was lucky enough to see some very good Australian movies: the noir The Square by Nash Edgerton, the incredibly funny Razzle Dazzle by Darren Ashton, the fascinating 10 Canoes by Rolf De Heer, the interesting Jewboy by Tony Krawitz, the tender fairy tale Opal Dream by Peter Cattaneo and the splendid animation movie Mary and Max by Adam Elliot.

My favourite Australian movie of these recent years, by the way, is Lantana by Ray Lawrence. If you’ve never seen it, please rent/buy the DVD. It is a beautiful, touching, outstandingly played story (if you can, please also see the other two movies by Lawrence: Bliss and Jindabyne).

Another film maker I really love is Peter Weir and I don’t think my life would have been the same without the vision of Walkabout, a masterpiece by Nicolas Roeg (1971).

And last, but not least, I owe to two Australian movies my funniest moments seated in a cinema: The adventures of Priscilla, Queen of Desert by Stephan Elliott and the (unfortunately) completely unknown in Europe The Castle by Rob Sitch.
When I feel depressed, I think about Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp dancing on I will survive in the middle of the Australian bush and, well, I can’t help myself: I’m happy again!

Besides my good foundation of Australian cinema, I wasn’t prepared for the experience of Samson and Delilah. When it comes to Aborigines, I always feel uncomfortable.

I mean, it is a very delicate subject in Australia, for evident reasons, and I’ve always found a false note in the representation of Aborigines in movies. The only exception is the character of the police woman in Lantana: she is Aborigine (or half-Aborigine) and this is a simple detail. Watching the movie by Thornton, the other night, I suddenly understood why I always felt that way: I’ve never watched a movie before on Aborigines made by an Aborigine. No false note whatsoever in his representation of the group. He was allowed to do something that other film-makers couldn’t do: to be tough with his own people.

The plot of the movie is very simple: Samson and Delilah are two young Aborigines living in a small community in Central Australia. When Delilah’s grandmother died (the only family she had), the two, who are secretly in love, leave the place trying to reach Alice Springs. The impact with the city is simply awful. All sorts of tragedies happen, but in the end they manage to go back to the community and to settle in an isolated but quite place in the Northern Territory.

I’ve rarely seen on screen such a powerful story.

Thornton, who’s been a cinematographer up until now, not only wrote, directed and edited the movie, but also partially composed the original soundtrack. He perfectly knows what he wants to say and how he wants to say it.

The images are so talkative, that there’s no need for words.

Thornton takes his time to tell us the story, and we savour every single moment of it. We enter into the bleak day by day life of these two young people very slowly, till the point it feels like it is our own life. We know that they are falling in love simply because they look to each other in a certain way (there’s a magnificent scene: Delilah seated in a car listening to some quite music looks at Samson dancing on some loud music from a ghetto blaster and the two tunes melt into each other, while Samson’s dancing is filmed in a sensual slow motion).

The violence too is filmed in a very strong way. Nobody is immune: the Australians towards the Aborigines and the Aborigines towards the Aborigines. Thornton wants to tell us that the good and bad could come from both sides (the white homeless that help the guys in town, the Aborigine woman that beat them up when they’re back to the community instead of welcoming them).

After the movie, we were lucky enough to have the film-maker present at the cinema. I really loved his witty and clever answers to the audience’s questions.

He said that this story is his story. He said that he’s been saved by cinema, otherwise he would have been one of the many Aborigines sniffing glue and getting drunk near some Australian highways. He said that this movie is his “400 Blows” (no surprise about the fact that I almost cried listening to this sentence: 25 years after Truffaut’s death, here it is an Aborigine film-maker talking about his cinema!!!).

Thornton, above everything else, was hoping that, leaving the theatre, every one of us meeting a homeless in the street would think about Samson and Delilah, and this will give us the will to help him/her.

I don’t know if this is going to happen but, for a moment, every one of us dreamt of being a better person, stepping out of that cinema.

So thanks, Mr. Thornton.