Whisper of the Heart
I never knew John Legend's 2017 coup on cinematic music hadstarted as far back as 1995, and in a animated Japanese film at that. I haven't seen all of the incriminated films from the past year, but I'm going to go ahead and guess that none of them uses them quite as touchingly as Yoshifumi Kondô does here. Well, Kondô and Miyazaki, who did pen the script, which results in a film that looks and sounds like a Miyazaki film, and at times even feels like it... but doesn't quite get there for me. Which is to say that's it's still a lovely, warm film that has occasional moments of greatness (the scene in which our main character sings and is accompanied by her love interest on the violin and the old musicians join in) and is all-around very solid.
It's the first Ghibli film I find to have a problem found in many Pixar films, which is that it feels very constructed. It's saying all the right things, and delivering the best possible message to its target audience (young girls primarily here, but there's nothing that wouldn't apply to boys as well)... but you can see it doing that. The only flight of fancy it allows itself, aka the requisite flying scene in a Miyazaki film (I guess Mononoke doesn't really have one), doesn't quite work as a result: the whole film is so resolutely down to earth that it doesn't really work. It looks nice and all, but it's like the film's heart isn't in it. The lighter touches of magical realism do work very well, especially the first time Shizuku follows the cat and finds the antique store. It's lower-key Totoro, or maybe more accurately lower key Kiki (that's a lot of ki), which, as much as I love those two, is perhaps not the best idea in the world.
This is all starting to sounds as if I didn't like it, but let's face it: it's Ghibli. This isn't their greatest effort on any front, but it's still quite good, and it only looks slightly bad in comparison to their masterworks. Minor Ghibli it is, but it's still something I'd recommend to anyone who isn't averse to animation and/or coming of age narratives, and would actively recommend to people in its target demographic. But maybe the fact that it feels so distinctly targeted is what makes it limited in its reach.
Days of Being Wild
Spoiler alert : the reviews I listed above are all better than whatever follows is going to be. Just read those (especially sdedalus and pix).
Allegedly the first part of an informal trilogy composed of this, In the Mood for Love, and 2046. I haven't seen the latter (yet), but I suppose that means the title isn't referring to the year it takes place in then ? Shame, I was really hoping for some melancholy romance set in a dystopian Hong Kong there. As you surely know, this – being a Wong Kar Wai film – is not about the plot. I was pleasantly surprised with how little I found confusing about it, which I think means I'm finally getting on his wavelength (and some familiarity with people like Leslie/Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau helps too). No, it's about mood... he really ruined the pleasure in realizing that by having the word in the title of one of his most prominent films, but oh well.
What mood is that, exactly ? Well, if I could easily define it, there wouldn't be much of a point making films to portray it, now would there ? Actually, « Days of Being Wild » covers it relatively well, though « Days of Being Nonchalantly Wild » would be even more accurate. It's becoming obvious to me at this point that I have nothing to say about this film other than I really enjoyed watching it. I might have enjoyed a film about Tony Leung's character more than one about Leslie Cheung, but I suppose that's what Chungking Express is for. Cheung is quite good though, and gets away with a performance that's always teetering between mysteriously charming and … kind of rapey ? To the point that I half expected him to start murdering everyone else in the film at some point, but no it turns out that he's more hedonistic than, you know, homicidal. Which becomes the focus point of the film after a while, and I thought I might have lost the film at that point since I liked his girlfriends a lot more than him, but the finale made me reconsider his character and appreciate him more.
But the bottom line is this : I got lost in the film, its cinematography, its music, its... mood. It's hard to define what makes that work, but it does.
Verdict: I really wanted to be the first one to send a film to the Sweet Sixteen, but what can I say, I liked Days of Being Wild better, so we'll have to get a third verdict here. Sorry for making this bracket even tougher to complete than it already is.