Evil does not Exist

Japanese director Ryuchi Hamguichi makes critically acclaimed movies in the international art-house style.  His pictures tend to be very long (for instance, 2021's Drive my car clocking in at three hours) and win awards at festivals.  Evil Does Not Exist (2023) is shorter than his other films, less than two hours long, and intentionally unimpressive.  It's a bleak parable about the commercial exploitation of nature, really just an anecdote with a contrived ending.  The movie is interesting but there is nothing particularly special about it -- perhaps, the film's dour low-key tone is its whole point, but it makes the picture a hard-sell; I'm not sure I would recommend it.  The movie is made to provoke arguments about its enigmatic ending.  But there's not enough heat in this frosty movie to make those arguments particularly robust.  

It's Spring in a mountainous area of Japan, apparently within driving distance of Tokyo.  Some people live in a village of scattered metal cabins with slant roofs -- it looks like a colony of Norwegian or Swedish modernist cottages in a murky, greyish forest.  A man named Tatumi chops and splits wood, patrols the forest looking for ginseng and wild wasabi, and carries water from a unprepossessing stream back to his van for use in a local restaurant.  The water is used for soups with udon and soba noodles and the cafe owner (who is from Tokyo) says that it has a particular efficacy in the food that she prepares,  Tatumi has an eight-year old daughter named Hana who likes to roam the woods looking for fallen pheasant feathers.  Displayed on the walls of Tatumi's house are pictures of him with the child and a woman.  But the woman never appears in the movie and we assume that she had died -- however, the film is elliptical and it is merely an assumption that Tatumi is a widow; maybe, his wife moved away or divorced him.  We don't know.  Tatumi and Hana, while collecting water for the noodle place, find the skeleton of a deer in the forest.  Tatumi tells his daughter that the deer was gut-shot by hunters and died because of its wound.  Sometimes, we hear distant shots -- it's hunting season in these woods.  Hana gives a pheasant feather to an older man, the village's chief, a fellow named Sagura.  Everyone in the hamlet seems related to one another.

A bland-looking mostly silent woman and a slightly older man make a presentation to the villagers on behalf of some sort of talent agency and theatrical group called Playmode.  The company is planning to build a campground, really a sort of luxury hotel, in the forests for "glamping" -- this means "glamor camping."  The place will have comfortable tents, many BBQ pits, and a number of other amenities.  The presentation doesn't go well -- the villagers, including Tatumi, are suspicious.  The plans for the glamping facility are obviously defective -- the sewage system is too small to the number of units.  The BBQ pits will pose a risk of fire in dry weather -- "this place is dry and windy," a woman tells the presenters.  There are a number of other objections which the PR people can't address.  A young man with dyed blonde hair says that Playmode is in a hurry to build because of "subsidies" that will expire.  He gets so angry that he lunges out of his seat, only to be restrained by Tatumi.  The meeting is inconclusive and the villagers remain hostile to the project.  But the chief (or mayor), Sagura seems willing to make a deal -- it just has to be a better deal.  The PR team (the bland woman and the man) return to Tokyo where the boss tells them to get the deal done -- they are told to coopt Tatumi by offering him a job as caretaker for the property.  In fact, there are tax credits or subsidies about to lapse and Playmode is in a hurry to get the Glamping enterprise up and running -- the blonde punk was right.

The woman and man motor back to the village.  They both express dissatisfaction with their lives in Tokyo.  The woman has tried on-line dating with no success.  The man wants to get married and move away from the city.  The couple go Tatumi's house where he is splitting firewood.  (The man whose name is Mayuzimi tries to split logs with limited success but, when he is successful, he is very enthused and muses about moving to the woods to live with the villagers.)  The PR team and Tatumi eat at the noodle place and discuss the project -- the campground is going to be built along a deer path in the woods; deer, Tatumi tells them, are docile until they are pushed into a corner, but will, then, fight fiercely.  The eight-year old Hana is roaming in the woods, lured along the trails by a bird that she is following.  Later, she doesn't return and the villages organize a search party to find her.  Tatumi with  Mayuzimi finds the girl in the twilight -- she is staring at a wounded deer.  (Spoilers here follow.)  It's clear that the child is in danger due to her close proximity to the luxuriantly antlered and dying deer.  But instead of rescuing Hana, Tatumi decides to strangle the inoffensive Mayuzimi.  He throttles the poor guy into unconsciousness.   By the time, he has completed his assault, the deer has apparently gored Hana -- it's vanished and she's lying on the frosty ground with blood coming out her ear.  Tatumi picks up the girl and carries her back to the village.  Mayuzimi revives for a moment and staggers across the icy field but collapses again.  

The ending is intended as a riddle.  But it's an irritating riddle:  Tatumi's obtuse decision to assault Mayuzimi results in his daughter being badly injured, maybe, even killed.  It's obvious that Tatumi identifies with the beleagured deer -- although the animals are mostly passive, they will fight when cornered.  Tatumi apparently thinks that the Glamping proposal has cornered the villagers and triggered there "fight or flight" response.  But Tatumi may also be a malcontent and, even, mentally ill.  When he comes upon the skeletal remains of the deer, he says with confidence that it was "gut-shot" and died for that reason -- but objectively there's no way that he could reach that conclusion on the evidence of the skull and scattered bones.  Presumably Tatumi is projecting hs own anxiety about the Glamping project onto the dead deer.  In fact, the villagers, although opposed to the project, generally keep an open mind about it and seem willing, even anxious, to make a deal.  Clearly, the "chief" or mayor wants the project, which will be economically beneficial to the area, to be implemented.  The mayor says that people living "upstream" must not act irresponsibly to allow their sewage and garbage to pollute the places where people downstream live -- this the ethic by which he lives.  These concerns are embodied in a scene in which the blonde-haired punk, searching for Hana, runs down a slope next to a concrete trench full of water careening over many box-like steps as the creek descends.  It's a somewhat surreal image of water flowing through a rationalized, cube-like concrete trench. 

The film's photography is gloomy (it looks cold and dim) and the landscapes aren't impressive.  The villagers live in nondescript woods split apart by snowy meadows.  The mountain peaks are far away, dusted with snow.  Most of the scenery consists of brush and groves of trees.  The creek that supplies water for the cafe is a just a moist seep in the woods leaking a foot-wide stream down hill.  The people living in this area fancy themselves pioneers -- the woods were first opened up for settlement during the housing shortage after World War II.  But there's no privation and the people have nice-looking cottages and a reasonably well-equipped modern school  Now and then, we see hawks and a couple deer.  The movie goes out of its way to avoid turning the PR team into villains.  The woman and man are polite, listen carefully to the villagers, and, in fact, poor Mayuzimi is murdered when he has decided that he's going to move to the woods and join the villagers --he's sick and tired of the megalopolis.  Hamaguichi directs according the international art house paradigm style -- sequences are filmed in single shots that last three or four minutes (you will see lots of wood being split in this movie); the camera tracks morosely through the woods and there are, at least, four instances of the camera shooting upward into the grey (or moonlit) sky as the camera moves over the forest floor -- ghostly looking twigs and branches make a web overhead.  There are four shots (at least) taken from the back of a moving vehicle looking away from the direction of motion.  Camera set ups are held until people walk out of the frame and, then, the empty shot may linger for another ten seconds.  There are relatively few close-ups and many shots are deliberately inexpressive -- people talk with their backs to the camera or are filmed from great distances that obscure their features as they speak.  The sound design derives from some of Godard's pictures -- changes of scene are signaled by jarring sound cues; music abruptly stops when the film cuts away to another scene and the soundtrack is vivid with the sound of chain saws, cars and trucks starting, the thud of an axe splitting wood, the sounds of birds and flowing water. Most of the compositions feature bluish-grey monochrome highlighted here and there by splashes of bright red -- the paradigm for this is a scene in the woman from Tokyo cuts her finger on a thorn and we see the razor-sharp thorn dripping blood; the wounded deer has a red gouge in its side.  A red ball sits in the lead-colored school yard.  Hamaguichi labors to make nature look as gloomy and uninviting as his urban landscapes.-- it's just patches of snow and a jumble of barren-looking trees and brush.  

The Lady in the Van

 The Lady in the Van is a 2015 film directed by Nicholas Hytner adapting a memoir by the celebrated British playwright, Alan Bennett.  The story, said to be mostly true, concerns a homeless woman who parked the van in which she was dwelling outside of Bennett's flat in Camden Village, a part of London.  The woman told Bennett that she intended to stay near his driveway for three months -- in fact, she lived by his home, in three different iterations of the van, for 15 years up to the date of her death in 1989.  Bennett first wrote an essay about the experience that he, later, expanded into a short book.  Then, he devised a monologue on the subject that was premiered in 1990 and, then, performed on BBC radio as a play in 1999.  The lady in the van, named Mary or Margaret Shepherd was played by Maggie Smith, the celebrated British actress who died on September 27, 2024 at the age of 89.  Smith was famous for her performances in the BBC show Downton Abbey as well as work she did in the Harry Potter films among many other iconic roles.  Smith looks terrible in the movie; her face is gray and she seems emaciated, traipsing about in shapeless filthy clothing.  The script begins with a oratorical cadenza about her bad odor -- she is said to smell like "the inside of an ear" and many other worse things.  A couple shots show excrement attributed to the character and she is said to defecate in a plastic bags that surround her reeking, noisome van.  At one point, Bennett, who is a character in the movie, reproaches himself for paying so much attention to Ms. Shepherd's shit -- a cynical version of himself says that this is because he is "caring" for the elderly female vagrant.  "Caring is all about shit," Bennett tells us.  Smith's performance is uncompromising, the kind of work for which elderly actors are acclaimed for being "brave", and Smith isn't afraid to appear in the worst possible light in this film.  Of course, as a young woman, she was one of Britain's greatest beauties and, so, the film is dispiriting in some respects -- but she imparts a fierce dignity to a character that most of us would turn away from in disgust if we met her on the street.  

The Lady in the Van is highly literate and intelligent.  The script is well-crafted and effective.  The subject matter is slender, however, and the story is tricked-out with some distressing twists and turns; to pad the material into a feature-length movie, Bennett turns the story into an account of his personal struggles as a closeted homosexual man, a lonely and isolated writer, and a devoted son caring for his own mother (who is suffering from senile dementia) in a plot that is posited as parallel to the story about Margaret (or Mary) Shepherd.  Writers, Bennet notes, are in dialogue with themselves -- they talk to themselves and, indeed, what is written on the page is the product of an interior conversation.  Bennett dramatizes this concept by dividing his character into two persons, both, more or less, identical although one is more formally dressed than the other.  Bennett says that one of the versions of himself is the person who has to live his life; the other version is Bennett as writer, an unscrupulous fellow who will use Ms. Shepherd's poverty and mental illness as fodder for his writing.  (The conceit is a little like several pictures involving Truman Capote including the TV show, The Swans and the film Capote.)  The double Bennett's allow the playwright to dramatize his reactions to the vagrant and provide brittle, witty and aphoristic dialogue about the woman -- it's a pretty clever concept and, for the most part, works well.  Mary Shepherd is on the lam -- she believes that she killed a bicyclist in a hit-and-run accident twenty years earlier.  A corrupt cop blackmails her -- this part of the movie seems weirdly obtuse:  is the cop supposed to be a villain and, if so, why is he portrayed so warmly (by the great Jim Broadbent)?  As the film progresses, Bennett provides further information about the homeless woman -- she turns out to have been once an accomplished pianist (she performed at the Proms), a former nun, and an ambulance driver in "blacked-out Kensington during the war."  The people in Camden Village, a very upscale neighborhood (the widow of Ralph Vaughn Williams, the great composer, lives there) are surprisingly accommodating to her and, throughout the movie, everyone behaves with British civility and equanimity.  The only villains in the picture are members of the Catholic Church -- apparently, Shepherd liked playing the piano more than praying when she was a novice nun and, as a result, her vow of obedience included a promise to never play the piano again.  (Toward the very end of the movie, just before her death, Shepherd pays some Chopin on a piano in a care center.)  Bennett contrives the film to depict his clashes with the obdurate, bullying and filthy Shepherd in the context of his own mother's decline -- his mother becomes comatose as the film progresses.  Ultimately, when Shepherd dies, her evil spirit hovering over Bennett is exorcized.  The gay man ends up with a loving partner and the movie has a happy ending the celebrates Alan Bennett becoming well-adjusted at the end of his own life. (Bennett, I should note, is still alive and, often, publishes diary entries in The London Review of Books).  This material is obviously deeply significant to Bennett as witness his extensive engagement with the subject but it's not immediate apparent as to what the movie is supposed to mean.  We see Bennett apparently hiring "rent-boys" throughout the movie -- Shepherd, to whom the concept of homosexuality seems alien, accuses the handsome young men of being "communists."  At the end of the film, Bennett has integrated himself into one figure; he no longer bickers with himself and, in fact, doesn't need to because he has a romantic partner living with him.  

The movie features an excellent cast of BBC character actors.  The picture is effectively filmed.  The whole show is conceived as a struggle against the sentiment that is inherent in the film's conception -- a wacky, eccentric homeless lady teaches a Gay man how to live with bravery and stand in  his own Truth.  To avoid the picture descending into bathos, Bennett and Hytner engineer several gruesome and jarring shocks -- there's a big close-up of human feces stuck on a garbage can and the scene in which Mary Shepherd accidentally kills the bicyclist is gory, with a big gout of blood disfiguring the front of the van.  Clearly Bennett loves this material so much that he can't let go of it -- the movie has three or four endings one after another, including Ms. Shepherd's ascent into heaven, and, in the last scene, we see the real Bennett participating with the movie crew in making the picture.  It's a charming, beautifully written, and inconsequential movie.

Industry

Why are people so angry?  Maybe, it has to do with this political moment and the fractiousness in our Republic.  Perhaps, social media, offering anonymous opportunities for people to rage at one another is partially to blame.  Social media permits non-confrontational confrontations -- that is, you can insult someone over the internet without the risk of getting punched in the nose. Or, maybe, and I venture this hypothesis leavened with some skepticism, indignation is a mainstay of our culture.  We are schooled in rage by the TV programs that we watch.  In the old days, kids got into fights and beat one another up with dismaying regularity.  But, now, physical fights result in police intervention, expulsion from school, and, general consternation that may end up implicating social workers and therapists.  By and large, I suppose that we live in a less violent world, something that is all to the good -- people no longer thrash one another over minor points of personal privilege or engage in duels or entertain themselves by bar-fighting.  But, human aggression, probably, is hard-wired and impossible to ameliorate.  And, so, we now spend our time vicariously enjoying insults and verbal aggression and displays of vehement indignation and anger presented to us on TV.  Cable TV in particular has become the great institute, the university of rage.  This is true of Cable News which operates around the clock to stoke the fires of righteous indignation and outrage.  But it is also apparent in the dramas that are broadcast on cable services like HBO.  And this brings me to a British show, just now concluded on HBO (now called MAX), bearing the title Industry. 

I confess that I have no idea as to the overarching plot of Industry or what it's characters are supposed to be doing.  I don't know why they are always insulting and berating one another.  Ostensibly, these tirades have something to do with the high intensity work place featured in the show, the so-called "industry" on which the program is based.  The characters labor for some kind of investment bank or stock brokerage house, an enterprise called Pierpoint located in the financial district in London.  Everyone in the show is depicted stooping over computer screens glowing with columns of numbers and graphs that show inscrutable indices that go up precipitously and, then, plunge with equal alacrity.  When the graphs show an upward trend, the workers all are jubilant and they engage in ecstasies of florid greed.  When the graph lines plunge, people get suicidal, come to work drunk or stoned on hard drugs such as heroin, and shriek at one another producing interminable rants and tirades.  The show makes no effort to educate its watchers as to what is going on -- presumably, the lines on the computer graphs signify wealth and profit or loss and poverty, but it's totally unclear what is going on.  People speak in impenetrable jargon rendered even more incomprehensible by the English accents that are frequently impossible to decipher.  When they are not at work, the people in the show copulate with one another, go to decadent parties, and howl at one another in rage.  The program has something to do with a concept called "short selling" -- although from time to time, people have tried to explain to me what this means I have been impervious to these explanations.  As far as I can see, "short selling" is some species of quasi-criminal fraud that renders the casino of high finance even more speculative, perilous, and unpredictable.   

As it happens, the episode on which I am reporting as characteristic of this show was the program finale. This wasn't clear to me until the end but the cross-cutting between different characters was supposed to tie-up the plot strands developed in the show.  Hence, the program was fractured into a series of short scenes presented as parallel action -- although I have watched about five of these shows, I can't recall the names of most of the characters and, certainly, have no emotional (or other) investment in them.   In keeping with the program's aggressive anomie, the different plot strands are isolated and feature small groups of characters atomized by their greed into truculent couples or trios -- since the trading floor with the computer plotted profit and loss displays was not operable during this show, there was really no forum in which the different protagonists could interact.  

The episode opens with a conclave of British bankers and Saudi investors insulting one another.  The Saudis ask something like "Why is your imperialism better than ours?" Then, there's a fisherman who gets threatened for some reason by another character.  Two women exchange Baroque insults and, then, blackmail threats.  A tall twit of the kind featured in Monty Python sketches travels around the country with a girl with black-hair called Jasmine.  An Asian guy who is a boss at the enterprise, now owned by the Saudis, gives a pep talk to his workers.  At first, they shout and harass him making snarky comments but his eloquence wins them over -- he expostulates on how greed is good a bit like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. We learn that a girl's father is some kind of predator.  The twit and the cute black-haired girl have driven to a extravagantly (and comically) huge country estate where someone important lives -- this turns out to be a hirsute tech-bro of some kind  The twit and the girl go for a stroll in the 100 acre garden by the mansion and end up having desperately urgent sex on a bench outdoors -- they claw off each other's clothing.  Then, the girl goes into the vast manor house with its walls covered in acres of medieval tapestry and a gallery of about a hundred Tudor and Elizabethan portraits.  The Tech-Bro, who admits to being a heroin addict, proposes marriage to the black-haired girl who is still, presumably, dripping with the twit's semen.  He's a wealthy guy and she agrees to marry him.  Meanwhile, the two women who have been alternately threatening one another and blackmailing others summon a Pakistani guy into a room and humiliate him with torrents of abuse.  (This is how people fire each other on this idiotic show.)  While the Pakistani pleads for his job, the women call him names including saying that he is a "punter" whatever that means.  Someone ends a conversation with the words:  "I hope you will enjoy feeling your flesh sear in the hell that you have made for yourself."  People get betrayed over some percentage of profits or REI (or some other inscrutable acronym) and hurl insults at one another.  The Asian guy who has given the pep talk and motivated the workers at the company is fired by his Arab masters, although it's not so bad because they give him 20 million dollars severance pay.  Some woman is involved in the Asian guy's firing and he accuses her of betraying him or betraying her own government -- she worked for Pierpoint and, also, for the regime at some point.  There are more tirades and harangues.  One of the two women who tormented the Pakistani (I think) hatches a criminal scheme to do more "short sales", conduct that seems reprehensible but, also, highly lucrative.  The Asian guy bursts into tears on the now-closed trading floor.  A bill collector insults the Pakistani and, then, pulls out a revolver and blows off his blonde girlfriend's head.  The black-haired girl who has agreed to marry the hirsute Tech-Bro is told that her husband-to-be is child molester who has raped 12 year old girls.  No worries -- he's a very wealthy man.  The twit is shown somewhere compromising himself by making another speech about greed.  The End.

As I hope you can see this is pure garbage, wholly unrelated to any kind of plausible social milieu or human psychology.  Everyone just screams at everyone else.  The dialogue is fifty percent threats and abuse.  The show is reasonably entertaining on the basis of its high-voltage charge of sheer, unmitigated rage and vitriol.  Industry is aggressively ugly, shot in shrill close-ups with an incessantly, and pointlessly, moving camera -- it has a soundtrack that sounds either like Mahler or a horror film or a  perky K-pop tune. The thing pushes all your buttons but I'm ashamed I spent so much of my increasingly short life watching this sort of thing.