Sunday, April 24, 2022

To Sleep So As to Dream

 Notes that I wrote while watching Kaizo Hayashi's To Sleep So As To Dream (1986) are decorated with small sketches that I made of shots that particularly impressed me.  Hayashi's black-and-white film, shot cheaply in 16 mm, is spectacularly beautiful.  As in classic American film noir, the picture uses shadows and pinpoints of light to conceal the paucity of its means.  In terms of composition and lighting, the movie is as beautiful as anything ever made and its pictorial authority is undeniable.  But the movie is so eccentric that it's a bit difficult to appreciate.  The film's plot involves strange loops, after the manner of Pirandello, in which the inside and the outside of the narrative switch places -- in the film's final ten minutes, the distinction between the movie's various levels of frame and narrative are so entirely blurred that some critics have equated the movie to a Moebius strip.  Hayashi made the film when he was 27, his first picture without any apprentice work in the movies and two-thirds of the picture is miraculously confident and self-assured.  (There's a long episode involving a gyroscope that manages to be both tedious and incomprehensible -- I watched the film twice and had much trouble figuring out what was going on in that part of the movie.)  The movie's oddity and affectations are rebarbative but, I found, that sticking with the film has rewards and the picture's baffling, involuted ending is even moving in an abstract sort of way.  It's important to observe that To Sleep... is a silent movie.  There are sound effects but, with one exception, no recorded dialogue -- the effect is that things that make noises that we hear in the film are, often, more lively, it seems, more animate than the characters who are pigeon-holed into various stereotypes and caricatures.  (The movie is similar to Mel Brooks 1976 Silent Movie  and  Hazanavicius 2011 The Artist, but, I think much better than those attempts to revive the silent picture format for contemporary audiences -- this is because the use of intertitles for dialogue is a thematic element to the Japanese movie's plot and links the detective story events, occurring in some weird version of the present with the film-within-a-film, a silent serial that gradually absorbs the modern day plot into itself.)  The elaborate lighting and camera angles along with the movie's silent film affectations give the project something of the feeling of a German expressionist picture -- this stuff can become cloying and overly precious and, although the movie is short (87 minutes), I still think it is a bit tedious and would profit by being cut to about an hour.  (This isn't too extreme for a thirties Universal horror film, for instance, many of which clock in at about 65 minutes.)

Two detectives are hired to find a girl named Bellflower who has been kidnapped and held for ransom.  The senior defendant is called Mr. Uotsuka; he's tough and "hardboiled" as evidenced by the fact that hardboiled eggs are the only thing we see him eat.  His sidekick is younger and named Kobayashi.  Kobayashi is strangely attired -- he's dressed like a kid from a thirties' movie, wearing durable shorts and a news carrier's cap.  (Aspects of the film remind me of Erich Kaestner's Emil and the Detectives, a mystery in which plucky, loyal kids are recruited to help fight crime.)  The two detectives are offered a fortune if they can find the kidnapped girl and save her.  (And they're given wads of cash to pay the million yen ransom.)  Scenes involving the detective are intercut with imagery that is all chiaroscuro showing an elderly woman watching a silent movie.  In the movie, a black-masked Ninja fights some identical-looking bad guys in white masks who have kidnapped a princess named Cherry Blossom.  The old woman seems very ill and may be dying.  She has a sort of butler who screens the silent movie, circa 1916, for her.  Before the action on the screen can be completed, the film sticks in the projector and burns up.  So the captured Cherry Blossom, although on the verge of rescue, is never actually saved -- like the figures on Keat's "Grecian" vase, the brave Ninja threatens her captors but she remains hostage to them, the action of her rescue arrested forever.  The detectives are visited by a mysterious old man who gives them three clues.  The first is a message about a tower and something called "Flower Home".  After various adventures, Mr. Utotsuka figures out that the kidnapers (called M. Pathe & Co.) are holed up in an amusement part attraction called "Flower Home" , a place that can be seen from the Jintan Tower, a bizarre building with a vertiginous Piranesi-style interior full of a soaring lattice-work of aerial catwalks and spindly ladders.  The rescue goes wrong and the detectives are thwarted.  Next, they are told to follow the clue of gyroscope.  This part of the film was completely impenetrable to me and involves much trekking about in warehouses and stylized forests that look like something out of Dr. Caligari.  This rescue also fails and Uotsuka is knocked out.  In a delirium he sees Bellflower who appears to him against a wall on which there are two "ultra-flat" (a Japanese pop art style) faces painted with a great flares of horizontal light delineating the edges of the image.  Uotsuka is told that the third clue involves "The Electric House".  This is the name of Tokyo's first moving picture theater.  An old woman gives Uotsuka a talisman, a tortoise-shell comb apparently once owned by Bellflower.  The "Electric House" previously a place where films made by the Japanese production company "M. Pathe" were shown, is long gone.  But Uuotsuka hallucinates the movie theater and attends a showing.  In this part of the film, the silent movie apparatus goes awry:  Japanese silents were accompanied by a Benshi or professional narrator -- these narrators became "movie stars" in their own right and their improvised narration of the silent films was an integral part of the entertainment.  Hayashi's decision to shoot the movie in silent format, therefore, seems to thwart the important role of the Benshi whose verbal narration of the picture was central to the experience.  But Hayashi decides to allow the Benshi's commentary as an exception to the rule of silence (except for sound effects) imposed on the rest of the movie.  The film shown at "The Electric House" turns out to be the same serial that the mysterious woman has been watching at home.  The bad guys in the silent picture fight off a fierce black-masked Ninja who is attempting to rescue the princess-hostage.  But, as in her home showing, the film suddenly stops before the girl can be saved -- the movie burns in the projector and the cops invade the theater claiming that the exhibition is a violation of Tokyo Film Regulations for 1917.  These statutes provide that women can not appear in movies -- female parts, as in Kabuki, have to be performed by men in drag; this is to protect public morals and, apparently, represents an actual limitation on Japanese films produced by businesses like M. Pathe, at least until the early twenties.  So again the on-screen efforts to rescue the princess fail.   It turns out that Mr. Uotsuka is hallucinating the movie theater in a saloon located where the old movie palace was once located.  The two detectives hurry across town to a shadowy house full of empty rooms and strange artifacts.  In a dark room, the heroes find the dying woman screening the old serial that keeps stalling out during the rescue scene.  Now the gangsters appear, including the two white masks who have kidnapped the Princess.  We understand that the old woman is the actress who played the princess in the 1917 serial; her melancholy-looking butler (like the part played by Von Stroheim in Sunset Blvd.) was the director of the 1917 film and he has contrived the events in our movie to bring all the characters together so that, at the end and fifty years later, the princess can be rescued.  We discover that Uotsuka is the Ninja in the black mask and two gangsters that have been harassing him are the white-masked enemies in the old movie.  After a fight, Uotsuka vanquishes the bad guys, thus effectively saving the princess.  The old man films the fight between the bad guys and the two detectives.  (He has earlier delivered a revolver to them to use in the battle -- in the serial we have seen the Ninja in the black mask pulling out a gun to threaten the villains.)  We see Cherry Blossom or Bellflower or whatever she is called vanishing into a foamy mist of actual falling cherry blossoms.  The old woman dies while the whole film crew and cast apparently look on.  We see another elegiac shot of her in the haze of cherry blossoms.  In a final shot, someone carries the dead woman out of the mansion -- it looks like the old director carrying the old woman on his shoulders.  (The shot defies gravity -- we can't figure out how the dead woman remains perched on his back).  A film production still shows that the man is actually Uotsuka carrying the young Bellflower.  The image in the film is properly, I think, ambiguous.

The picture is astonishingly audacious and intricate.  Although made with a budget between $50,000 and $100,000 (the cost for a soft-core "pink" porno film), the movie seems lavishly produced.  The camera-work is startlingly beautiful and the set decoration is fascinating to the point of distracting from the film's actors and action.  In one shot, the hero broods over a table covered in symmetrically arranged hard-boiled eggs while Kobayashi, dressed like a cast member of Newsies, rides up and down idly on a carousel horse -- the detectives' office is decorated in lucky horseshoes and dart boards and, in the background, a bubble machine shoots bubbles ala Lawrence Welk into the air.  (In a later scene, the princess stands in a cloud of bubbles that simulate falling cherry blossoms.)  The film is full of strange posters, doodled graffiti on walls, and bizarre furniture -- at one point, Uotsuka is trapped in a sofa suspended high over the gangster's warehouse.  Some shots are simply inexplicable -- when the detectives enter the dying woman's mansion, they find one room full of suits on hangers that begin to spin and dance as if alive.  What?  Why? When this film was released, Hayashi was declared the successor to Seijin Suzuki and thought to be the future of Japanese film.  But his later movies didn't always succeed and, in fact, he has only completed about eight films (several of them documentaries) in a thirty years since To Sleep... was made.  (Hayashi is best known for three movies featuring "Maiku Hama" -- that is, Yokohama Mike or "Mike Hammer" from the Mickey Spillane novels -- these were produced in the mid-nineties; he's also the auteur of a computer game called "Seven Blades" produced by Konami.)  The movie is a master class in Japanese film and its history and preserves the performance of one of Japan's last Benshi.  It's too exotic for most viewers and so elaborate intricate that you have to watch closely or you will lose the gist of the film -- this is a characteristic of American noir such as Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep, a source for some of the pictorial aspects of Hayahi's movie.  On the Arrow Academy Blu-Ray, The movie has a supremely irritating commentary track in which an Australian or British and a Dutch film critic try to one-up one another as to their knowledge of obscure Japanese movies.  A couple times the guy with the British (or Australian accent) talks about how much he enjoyed the Maiku Hama films; the Dutch guy demurs but won't admit that he hasn't seen those pictures.  Finally, the Brit (or Aussie) gets irritated and asks the pompous Dutch guy, who has been correcting him on details completely irrelevant to the Hayashi film, whether he actually saw "Yokohama" Mike pictures -- and his interlocutor has to admit that "no" he hasn't yet been able to see them.  Good stuff.  The movie, To Sleep is silent and if ever a film called out for interpretation and information then this is the movie-- instead, these idiots talk about everything but what we can see on the screen.

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