Round Three Bonus Resurrection ReviewMoving (Sômai Shinji, 1993)
Here's an abbreviated list of films that came to mind as points of comparison during my screening of
Moving:
Kramer vs. Kramer,
Mrs. Doubtfire,
The Family Game,
Ordinary People,
Paris, Texas,
Boyhood,
We Need to Talk About Kevin,
Love Exposure,
Ponette,
Léolo,
The Four Hundred Blows,
All About Lily Chou-Chou, and
An American in Paris. That maybe gives you some idea of how Sômai's film is very familiar and yet, simultaneously, very distinctive.
If your pattern recognition skills are operating at or near indutry standards, you'll have rightly guessed that
Moving is a Japenese film about a young girl coming to terms with her parents' separation. If you're in the advanced class, you might have further deduced that Sômai's film artfully adopts the subjective point of view of the young protagonist and culminates in a twenty-minute ballet sequence (or the equivalent). But you don't have quite enough clues at your disposal to know that Tabata Tomoko, as Renko, gives one of the all-time great child performances. The role demands that she play Renko not as the confused, vulnerable girl she probably is, but rather as the completely self-possessed girl Renko sees herself to be. And Tabata is absolutely phenomenal. Sômai puts the whole film on her back, and she carries it with the preternatural poise of her character. (Had
Moving been a remake of
The Exorcist, it might well have been the scariest movie of all time.)
Sômai is an artful director, with a knack for orchestrating long takes in a way that disguises their length and keeps them more absorbing than distancing; and the script, despite its familiar trappings, is fairly savvy about veering in the less expected direction, both between scenes and within scenes. Still, there's something about
Moving that makes it a movie I admire more than I like — on least on this initial viewing. I haven't quite pinpointed why that is. One certain problem is a repetitiveness that dogs the film's second act, with Renko rebuffing a parent and running away on too many occasions. The subjective portrayal of her character and her parents can be very frustrating at times, and I bet myself that I'd find at least one reviewer that couldn't enjoy the film because they spent the whole viewing wanting to spank her (
and I won). There's definitely something to that; but then the final act of the film is as unexpected as it is redemptive.
Even though I didn't fall in love with anything, I'm still really happy with the batch of films I chose to consider to fill out the fourth round of the bracket.
Yamadas got me off to a solid start, and then each film after that was progressively better. That's not exactly a coincidence: I watched them in the order of what I guessed the likelihood of resurrection would be. I'm not sure if I truly guessed right, or if it was self-fulfilling prophecy. It's especially hard to tell because
This Window Is Yours,
2/Duo,
Moe no suzaku, and
Moving are all perfectly solid films, with very little to separate them, in terms of quality.
This Window Is Yours, despite ranking fourth, might actually be the most likely to win an audience award. But what ultimately sets
Moving apart is its distinctiveness. There's already another Suwa film in the bracket, and there are other films stylistically close to
Moe no suzaku, but to my knowledge, there's nothing quite like
Moving, not even among Iwai's many entrants. Sômai brings a fresh voice to the bracket, and so I'm happy to add his film into the mix. It doesn't hurt, either, that it's available on
YouTube; and that roujin, worm@work, and some Scottish guy discuss it at length on
this podcast.
Bonus Resurrection Standings (the top film will earn resurrection)Up next: Round four!
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