palm pictures
Ogadiri minds the jellyfish in Bright Future.
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Bright Future
Runs Fri., Jan. 28–Thurs., Feb. 3, at Grand Illusion
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2003 Future is sober and impassioned. Or so it seems—at the center of the film is a glowing, thoroughly poisonous pet jellyfish, the symbolic freight of which goes entrancingly uninterpreted. The invertebrate's owner, Mamoru (Tadanobu Asano), is a discontented twentysomething temping in a hand-towel factory with Yuji (Joe Ogadiri), another inexpressive youth with social difficulties. Kurosawa clutters these layabouts' lives with indecision and stasis; maintaining the jellyfish tank's transition from salinity to freshwater occupies their thoughts. Only when their mildly aggressive boss takes an interest in them are they compelled into action—and murder. From the jailhouse, Mamoru charges Yuji with the jellyfish, but the glutinous creature slips beneath the floorboards, where the baffled punk sometimes glimpses a mysterious body of water under Tokyo. As the lost-yet-ever-present jellyfish takes on a proactive and entirely nonsensical role of its own, Yuji meets up with Mamoru's grieving father, and the two begin to establish a tentative family.
Kurosawa strolls through his narrative with relaxed confidence, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular on his mind. Still, Future can be off-putting— neither of the two protagonists attempts to engage the camera, and more woe is expended on mourning Mamoru than considering his victims, leaving the transcendental flights of the jellyfish metaphor something less than dazzling. But Kurosawa is certainly not thinking in terms of bourgeois values or character empathy—in the 11th hour, his film diverts its gaze to an odd youth gang outfitted in starched white Che T-shirts rousing themselves from disillusioned torpor and, in a stirring traveling shot, hunting for relevance and confrontation in the streets. As a waving flag of anarchic will, it evokes the codas of Diary of a Chambermaid and Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; as an ending, it leaves you speechless. (NR) MICHAEL ATKINSON
The Chorus
Opens Fri., Jan. 28, at Harvard Exit
Les Choristes, a comfortable tooth-rotter of a film about the sweet power of song, is as eager to be loved as Lassie, and as full of tricks. For those forever mewling that they just go to the movies to have a good time, this is the Golden Ticket; it certainly was in its native France, where it not only cleaned up at the box office but "made choral singing fashionable," even "winning over young people." (And who would doubt the word of the Federation of Petits Chanteurs?)
Heaven knows it's been cannily crafted by writer-director-composer Christophe Barratier, who sets his adaptation back in 1949, when the French countryside was full of prisonlike schools created to house the recent war's orphans and incorrigibles, all of which lends his film's sepia tones a patina of nostalgia. However, before we're allowed into the body of the story, there's a high-toned contemporary prologue, in which a conductor is visited by a former schoolmate who brings with him the diary of their boyhood choir master and inspiration, Clément Mathieu (the excellent Gérard Jugnot, veteran of 70 films). As the men reminisce, poof!—we are back to the glorious Auvergne of their youth.
If you know, going in, that the choral singing is just dandy but that this world has only: legendary conductors, battered diaries, rough childhoods, humble teachers, tyrannical principals, troubled boy sopranos, beautiful single mothers, soaring voices, and floppy eared orphans, are you still game? OK, you're on your own.
P.S. Devilishly handsome Jean-Baptiste Maunier, 13, did his own singing. (PG-13) SHEILA BENSON
Cowards Bend the Knee
Runs Fri., Jan. 28–Wed., Feb. 2, at Northwest Film Forum
The cinematic world of Canadian director Guy Maddin, though generally set in the past and filmed with silent-era conventions, is feverish with modern neuroses. For a melodrama with "knee" in the title, his 2003 Cowards is more peculiarly obsessed with hands, though breasts and penises are also amply on display. The most offending pair of mitts belong to Winnipeg Maroons hockey star Guy Maddin (actually played by Darcy Fehr), who impregnates and abandons his girlfriend, Veronica (Amy Stewart), then falls under the sexual spell of a mother-daughter team of hair stylists/abortionists—leading to many murders with his selfsame 10 fingers of shame.
Have I lost you so far? There's a surprising amount of lurid plot in only 64 minutes, which were originally exhibited at an art gallery as a series of six-minute peephole shorts like a nickelodeon. Each of the 10 chapters is more or less self-contained but always essentially mysterious. You can easily follow Cowards from A to Z (unlike some of Maddin's past works), but linearity isn't important to its meaning. Rather, the hockey star's initial transgression leads him into a fever dream of broken taboos. It's not enough that Veronica should die on the abortionist's table; her ghost then haunts him, returns to him sexually, then finally takes up with his own father. More symbolic incest is enacted as his new lover, Meta (Melissa Dionisio), convinces him to strangle her mother and her mother's lover (a hockey teammate and cop) with hands—bear with me now—transplanted from Meta's murdered father. "No hand shall touch me until my father is avenged!" she tells Maddin, who's maddened with desire to handle her mammaries.
