FILM REVIEW: KUNDUN

Martin Scorsese has always shown a deep reverence and appreciation for Asian cinema, as reflected in his championing of Asian auteurs like Edward Yang, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Through his World Cinema Foundation, Scorsese has rescued and restored many important Asian films, including A Brighter Summer Day and The Housemaid. With Kundun (1997) Scorsese made his first Asian themed film, and the result is one of his emotionally resonant and moving films.

Kundun is a biopic about Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The film explores the Dalai Lama’s life from his youth in Tibet up to his exile to India in 1959. Like Scorsese’s other spiritually themed films The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence, Kundun explores the topic of religious persecution. After the Communist government of China took over Tibet, atrocities against the Dalai Lama and his followers were committed, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee to India.

Throughout Kundun, Scorsese shows the struggles the Dalai Lama faced to maintain his practice of non-violent resistance. As the spiritual leader of his followers, the Dalai Lama has to protect his own people against the violent and oppressive actions of the Chinese invaders. Since the Dalai Lama obviously does not have access to a military or arms to defend himself, he tries at first to meet face to face with Mao Zedong to negotiate a peace deal.

This results in Mao furthering his prosecution of the Tibetan natives, and lecturing the Dalai Lama about how religion is poison. This is similar to the Japanese Inquisitor in Silence chastising Andrew Garfield’s Jesuit priest about how “the tree of Christianity withers in Japanese soil” because it has been poisoned. Indeed, both Kundun and Silence explore how peaceful protagonists confront and deal with oppressive, violent outside forces which view religion as something to be eliminated.

In a Scorsese gangster film, the protagonists naturally will counter violence with even more violent acts, resulting in a vicious circle of incessant death and destruction. Kundun is Scorsese’s first attempt to explore how one can fight violence with peaceful protest and compassion. Amidst the brutal oppression of his times, the Dalai Lama hopes that his example of compassionate resistance will result in peace.

We never see explicit depictions of the violence committed against the Tibetan people, except for one brief vision by the Dalai Lama of the corpses of his fellow monks. Instead, Scorsese fills Kundun with quiet but visually astounding imagery inspired by Buddhist philosophy, such as a breathtaking scene of an elaborate sand mandala being created and blown away. Kundun is an almost ethnographic exploration of the Dalai Lama’s culture, as Scorsese faithfully depicts the many rituals and traditions of the Tibetan people.

Throughout the film, Scorsese emphasizes the fragility of the Dalai Lama’s peaceful existence. The film’s earlier, more elegiac scenes of the Dalai Lama’s youth contrast with the more disruptive, frantic scenes of the Chinese army and government gradually infiltrating Tibet, such as an astonishing scene of the Chinese army marching ominously through the streets. This temporal nature of existence is emphasized throughout Kundun, as Scorsese is showing how life itself is transitory, and so are violence and suffering.

The last act of Kundun, as the Dalai Lama escapes to India, is an almost wordless sequence of events that depicts both the tragedy and ultimate hope of the Dalai Lama’s life. Just as he is about to cross the border into safety, he speaks these haunting words, “I think I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself.” Following the example of these words by the Dalai Lama, Scorsese emphasizes images of peace instead of violence in Kundun in the hopes of reflecting human nature’s deeper good.

FILM REVIEW: SILENCE

Martin Scorsese struggled for decades to adapt Shusaku Endo's 1966 novel Silence into a film, and the result is a dark, brutal, and powerful masterpiece about a man's struggle with his faith, in the face of almost unbearable suffering and persecution. Although I am not a particularly religious person, what I connected with in Silence (2016) is its depiction of someone whose faith in a transcendent force guides his every thought and action. This force can be "Jesus," or "Buddha," or "Allah," but what Scorsese is trying to portray is a belief in a higher force that allows us to transcend the darker, more destructive side of human nature. 

Set in the 17th century, Silence is the story of a mission by Portuguese Jesuit priests Sebastiao Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) to find Father Cristovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson) in Japan, who has been rumored to have renounced his faith after being tortured.  Although they know that they are entering a country which at the time was targeting Christians with violent religious persecution, the two Jesuit priests nevertheless carry out their mission without hesitation.  In the process, the priests befriend a group of Japanese Christians, who practice their faith in secret under fear of being tortured and even killed.  Eventually, the two priests are captured by the Japanese, and Father Rodrigues' faith in a higher power is put to the ultimate test.

While the leads of Silence are the two Jesuit priests, Scorsese also gives equal time to the many Japanese actors in the film.  The standouts are Issey Ogata as the cruel and manipulative Inoue Masahige, Shinya Tsukamoto as the passionately devout Christian Mokichi, and Yosuke Kubozuka as the conniving and self-centered Kichijiro.  Shinya Tsukamoto gives a particularly powerful performance as a long-suffering Christian who is able to maintain his faith even under the cruelest forms of punishment.  Indeed, Silence is all about the struggle to maintain one's sanity and strength in the face of overwhelming brutality.  

Filmed in the verdant landscape of Taiwan, the natural scenery as shot by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto is gorgeously rendered.  Scorsese contrasts the beauty of nature with the cruelty of the human world, and he doesn't flinch from showing us the bloody and brutal extents to which the Japanese inquisitors will go to torture and persecute the Jesuits priests and their fellow Japanese converts.  Silence continues Scorsese's examination of religious persecution, which he explored before in The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun.  In this sense, Silence completes Scorsese's spiritual trilogy of films, with the connecting thread between the three films being a protagonist who struggles with keeping his faith in a world where the most atrocious and inhumane forms of destruction and violence exists.  

Although Silence is on its surface a religious film, its message of compassion for those who are suffering is a universal one.  Rodrigues is not only seeking to maintain his faith in a society that has outlawed it as a symbol of Western imperialism and control; he is ultimately seeking to transcend the cruelty and brutality of his time by not giving into his darker impulses to violently rebel against or physically attack those who are persecuting him.  Rodrigues is able to do this by never letting go of his faith in a higher power, which he views as a positive symbol of peace amidst a world filled with violence.  

Throughout the film, Rodrigues views his mission as one of bringing peace and love to those who are less fortunate than him; hence his willingness to take in the suffering Japanese villagers at the beginning of the film and allow them to practice their faith in peace.  If we take away the subject matter of Christianity and religion, we can also see Rodrigues as someone who views it as his life mission to be compassionate to all.

Indeed, throughout the film, Scorsese contrasts the more peaceful actions of Rodrigues with those of the inquisitors.  After one of the Japanese prisoners is horrifically beheaded for refusing to renounce his faith, Rodrigues gives forgiveness to another Japanese prisoner who is clearly a scoundrel and a liar.  Rodrigues sees the goodness in everyone as a guiding force in his life, while the inquisitors use violence and torture to maintain their worldview, much like the outlaw criminals in Scorsese's gangster films.

The use of physical forms of religious belief is displayed throughout Silence, in the form of Bressonian-like close-ups of hands in prayer, and various paintings and likenesses of Christ.  These physical manifestations of religious iconography are presented as forbidden symbols of spiritual expression in a wider society that forbids them.  Eventually, Rodrigues is forced to renounce his Christianity by stepping directly onto a likeness of Christ in an act of apostasy.  Interestingly enough, Rodrigues' struggles to communicate with God seem to stop after he steps on this physical form of religion.  Scorsese is showing how Rodrigues is finally able to transcend the outer realm of belief and internalize it into a deeper, spiritual inner world.  

Ultimately, Silence is a film about a man who struggles to maintain his faith in a benevolent, higher power amidst a world filled with death and destruction.  Scorsese shows us this struggle in masterfully directed scenes of betrayal and spiritual turmoil, but throughout Silence is a deep, unyielding belief in the goodness of humankind.  Without giving anything away, the last image of Silence shows Rodrigues literally holding onto a symbol of compassion and love, long after he has struggled with being able to outwardly reveal his faith in God. Scorsese's Silence shows us how even in the darkest of times, we should never let go of our better selves.  

FILM REVIEW: THE IRISHMAN

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) is a stunning and monumental achievement. It’s a late career masterpiece that caps off a sort of gangster trilogy that began with Goodfellas and Casino. While Goodfellas was about the youth and joy of the gangster lifestyle (albeit a joy tinged with the bitter reality of violence) and Casino was about the success of middle aged gangsters, The Irishman is about a gangster at the later stages of his life, reflecting on the destructive consequences of the death and wreckage he has left behind. Although the first hour and a half of The Irishman has the ironic joie de vivre of the gangster as outlaw on display in Goodfellas and Casino, the second half of The Irishman is a much more mournful portrait of an aging gangster trying to atone for his sins.

Scorsese’s The Irishman is based on Charles Brandt’s book “I Heard You Paint Houses,” which is the biography of the gangster Frank Sheeran.  Both the book and the film portray how Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, ascends the ladder of organized crime to eventually work for the powerful labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino) who has extensive dealings with the criminal underworld. Sheeran gets his start through a chance encounter with the powerful Italian gangster Russell Bufalino (played by Joe Pesci), who takes him under his wing and helps Sheeran along in his ascension up the ranks of the mafia.

What separates The Irishman from Scorsese’s earlier gangster films is its much broader social and political scope, as Sheeran’s dealings with organized crime bring him into contact with such powerful historical figures and events as the election and assassination of John F. Kennedy, the heated union disputes between Jimmy Hoffa and his rivals, and the attempted American coup of Fidel Castro’s Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion. This expanded range of context gives The Irishman a richer and more complex backdrop for Scorsese to explore how deeply intertwined the world of organized crime has been with all aspects of American life.

This deeper backdrop gives The Irishman an epic feel that allows the viewer to luxuriate in the almost novelistic texture of the narrative, which feels like classical literature at times. We as the viewer are as fully engulfed in the three and a half hour runtime of Scorsese’s elaborately designed cinematic canvas as we would be reading a 1000 plus page Leo Tolstoy historical novel.  The Irishman explores how history, on both a societal and personal level, can have tragic consequences on an individual’s life.

Indeed, the final hour of The Irishman feels almost like an Ingmar Bergman film, as Sheeran struggles to come to terms with his fading mortality, while at the same time reflecting on the many deaths he has brought on through his own actions. De Niro’s powerful performance, which is achieved largely through non-verbal physical cues, brings to weight the full tragedy of Sheeran’s life, culminating in a darkly funny scene where he goes shopping for his own coffin. 

The specter of death haunts almost every frame of The Irishman, from its opening scenes in a retirement home filled with aging and sick elders, to its many literal deaths brought on by the violent actions of its gangster characters. Scorsese is laying bare for us in a much more cold and brutal way than he did in Goodfellas and Casino the full destructive nature of the gangster lifestyle. Also, unlike in his earlier gangster films, Scorsese is not interested in fetishizing or glamorizing violence in The Irishman. In one memorable scene, two gangsters enter a barbershop as the camera pans along with them. Instead of showing the gangsters massacring their targets in the barbershop, Scorsese keeps the camera outside the store focused on a bouquet of flowers, as we hear screams and gunshots inside. With The Irishman, Scorsese is not interested in showing us violence; instead, he wants to show the destructive consequences of violence.

In Goodfellas and Casino, scenes of brutal violence were oftentimes counteracted by scenes of gangsters enjoying the fruits of their labor as if they were essentially a happy family unit of sorts. However, in The Irishman, there is no real family unit for Sheeran to fall back on or rely on for warmth and comfort.  

Instead, the substitute “family” unit of the gangsters in The Irishman are all portrayed as backstabbing and manipulative individuals who view Sheeran as only an instrument for them to use for their own means. Also, Sheeran’s actual biological family are equally cold and distant towards him; something which is justified due to the many murders he was responsible for. Sheeran realizes this near the end of his life, so the last part of the film deals with Sheeran’s attempts to reconcile with his biological family over his violent past.

It’s almost as if Scorsese, like Sheeran’s character, is atoning for what he perceives as his past “sins.” Scorsese has oftentimes, wrongly in my opinion, been accused of glorifying the gangster lifestyle through his films. While Goodfellas and Casino did sometimes portray gangsters as having at times glamorous lives, the films also ended by showing how ultimately empty these lives were.  The Irishman, with its more meditative and measured tone about gangsters, is Scorsese’s attempt to come to terms with his career, and reflecting on the results of his past work.  

Ultimately, what makes The Irishman such a powerful and important film is its message of redemption. Scorsese is asking us if we can forgive someone who has led a life of death and destruction, and if not, then what ultimately is it that makes us human?  Do even the most violent and seemingly immoral people have even a shred of humanity left in them? Perhaps, Scorsese is saying, we can strive to seek peace and redemption even among those who seem irredeemable. 

In the last act of The Irishman, Sheeran tries to make amends with his estranged daughters. The very fact that Sheeran is even trying to reunite with his family near the end of his life means that he himself sees the error of his ways, so he still has some humanity left. With The Irishman, Scorsese is telling us— if someone as seemingly unforgivable as Sheeran can find redemption and seek a more peaceful life, then so can we all.

Or, as Scorsese himself has said, “It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.”

LEOS CARAX AND THE FOLLY OF PRAISE: PART ONE

In 1999, the French director Leos Carax was booed out of Cannes with his film Pola X.  The character of Pierre in Pola X was based upon Leos Carax himself.  Like Carax, Pierre was a celebrated artist whose career fell into decline after his earlier phenomenal successes.  In 1984, when Carax was only in his twenties, he released his first feature length film, Boy Meets Girl, which was a huge critical and commercial success in France and Europe (although it was virtually ignored in the United States). 

Carax was hailed as the next great European film director, with many comparing him to his mentor, Jean Luc Godard.  Carax’s next film, Mauvais Sang, was also a huge hit and his reputation was rising.  Then, in 1991, Carax released what was at the time the most expensive film in French cinema history—The Lovers on the Bridge. 

The Lovers on the Bridge

Audiences and critics ravaged The Lovers on the Bridge, calling it a colossal waste of talent and money (although recently The Lovers on the Bridge has come to be seen as a classic).  Needless to say, Carax was devastated, and he disappeared from the filmmaking scene until 1999 with Pola X, whose disastrous reception sent Carax back into exile until 2008’s anthology film Tokyo.

Perhaps, like Pierre, Carax finally realized that all the praise that he received earlier in his career was ultimately false, as proven by the derision he faced later in his career.  Critics and audiences celebrated Carax during the early phase of his career, but when Pola X came out, the perception of Carax changed to that of a wasted talent.  But, Pola X is no different from his earlier films in terms of its artistic quality. 

What was different was that Carax had fallen into the “tearing down” phase of his career after his initial success—a precarious and potentially career ending phase that all great artists experience.  For some psychological reason, we have a tendency to want to destroy those things which we love the most. 

Pola X

Cinema history is filled with directors who were hailed as messiahs of film early in their careers, and then just as they reached their peek, the critics and the public soundly beat them down.  Perhaps the cruelest example of this is Michael Cimino, who began his career with the commercial success of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and then skyrocketed into fame with The Deer Hunter, a hugely popular film that was a cultural phenomenon at the time of its release.   

 

All this success occurred for Cimino while he was still only in his thirties.  And then came the infamous film Heaven’s Gate, which, like The Lovers on the Bridge, was the most expensive film in Hollywood history at the time.   

Heaven's Gate was a collosal commercial and critical disaster which contributed to the near bankruptcy of United Artists, and the resultant buy out of United Artists by MGM.  Cimino never recovered from this fiasco, although he did direct some embarrassing films, which did nothing to improve his reputation.

Other directors have faced similar derision after being initially celebrated, including even Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, but unlike Cimino and Carax, they were able to recover and make much more successful films. 

So, what lesson is to be learned here?  For directors, the lesson is to realize that, in true existentialist fashion, public and critical response to their films is nothing more than a subjective perception. 

In order to advance in their careers, they must learn to put the past behind them, and focus on perfecting their craft.  Carax comments on this lesson in Pola X.  The character of Pierre in Pola X begins the film with a comfortable life, living in an opulent mansion with an older, attractive woman.  At this point, his life is defined by his success as a writer; his material wealth surrounds him, and he regularly makes public appearances talking about his work. 

His life has meaning, but after he meets Isabel, a mysterious woman who may or may not be his sister, Pierre starts to question his existence.  He sees how meaningless his wealthy lifestyle is and as he becomes more and more intrigued by Isabel, Pierre starts to pull away from his material goods. 

Pierre realizes that his life has been defined by how the public perceives him, and he realizes that the perception they have of him conflicts with how he perceives himself. 

To Pierre, he is still a great writer, but he confesses to Isabel at one point that he is unable to express himself artistically because there is “something” from the outside preventing him from doing so.  This “something” is obviously Pierre’s constant need for public adoration for his work, which ultimately paralyses him from expressing himself.