City Lights – Weekend
[ad_1]
The release of Koji Fukada’s “Personal Life” from the main competition of the Venice Film Festival is a delicate melodrama that promises the Russian audience the discovery of a marvelous new director.
Do you know that in Japan, a special city service is involved in turning on electric lights on the balconies of typical high-rise buildings? They are lit centrally, like our street lights. With an interval of a fraction of a second, with a click, at twilight, one after another, the houses are covered with cheerful lights, as if their inhabitants are simultaneously welcoming the evening, dinner, the end of the working day. That’s very beautiful.
Japanese director Koji Fukada invites you to share the pleasure of contemplating this beauty in his new film “Private Life”. Fukada has been filming for over 20 years, but has always remained in the shadow of his Oscar-winning and festival-winning peers Hirokazu Kore-eda and Ryusuke Hamaguchi (with the latter they even studied with the same master, Kiyoshi Kurosawa). The very fact of participation of “Private Life” in the main competition of Venice-2022 is the highest festival achievement of the director today. That, and the 2016 Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for Harmonium at Cannes. Fukada is delicate in everything that concerns color and atmosphere, mood. But for festival fame, he is too inconsistent and omnivorous: his films range from the 50-minute anime “Pomegranate” based on the story of Balzac to the drama “The Real”, which was subsequently remounted into a four-hour film for rental.
“Private Life” could also be a drama. In any case, she, with the same unpredictability as in dramas, when in each series the viewer receives a new story or an unexpected twist, winds through the fates of seven characters living in those very high-rise buildings opposite each other. The high-rise buildings are separated by an asphalt field – apparently intended for parking, but not used in any way – but anyway, when they need to talk, they just go out onto the balconies and yell at each other, like the heroes of the Satire Theater play “Little Comedies of the Big House”: this is the the stratum is not so much successful, but families anchored in urban life. Almost all the heroes of “Personal Life” are social workers from the same service.
“Personal Life” begins with one of these shouting calls from balconies. The excitement of the heroes on this sunny afternoon in anticipation of the birthday party of the father of the Fukada family is emphasized by tiny elegant spots scattered around the frame – red, red, pink, the color of the sea wave. One of them is a yellow children’s hat that is drying on the balcony. And when the holiday is over – with absolutely Fellini nuns singing karaoke – this panama from a color spot that creates a mood will turn into a detail that says everything about the state of the character in the frame. Its owner, a six-year-old boy, in the midst of a party, will slip in the bathroom and break to death. In the morning we will see his mother and a lonely panama over her on a hanger. The woman is wearing yellow trousers, but as she moves further away from the camera and into the frame, due to the change in intraframe lighting, the trousers turn from yellow to gray: this is how Fukada works delicately with color and storytelling.
The boy who died was a champion in reversi, a popular game in Japan similar to checkers. Reversi is one of the film’s running motifs, and Fukada’s script is reversed. We will not so much find out what will become of the heroes as what happened to them before. Also akin to the plots of dramas or Bombay melodramas, when the viewer is constantly forced to clap on the forehead: oh, it turns out she is her daughter, oh, so this is her ex-husband! The two exes are walking in a typical melodramatic landscape for a scene from the series “It’s nice to remember at sunset the love once forgotten”: emerald hills, separated by a river, in the distance, the banks are connected by a purple bridge. The woman says: “When you left me, I lived for a long time with the feeling that the world was empty.” Banality? Well, yes. But if you have ever loved and lost love, have you ever felt the same and described your feeling in the same words? Or – the song that gave the name to the film and sounds in the finale: “Even if I never see your smile again, stay alive” (we had exactly this: “Please, just live, you see – I live by you”). Banalities for that and banalities, that these are words that almost everyone said, feelings familiar to everyone. Banality turns into vulgarity when the performer has gone. In “Private Life” we are dealing with a subtle, sensitive master. Although the plot, having changed direction a dozen times, will lead us to the only conclusion “because life is like this”, the main meaning of all melodramas and serials, there is nothing left but to sigh in agreement and look with regret from parting from the very balcony where it all began , following the heroes, leaving for a silent walk through the same field of asphalt, now warmed by the sunset. How good and true it will be to leave this film right now, in the late warm sunset of the middle of summer.
In theaters from June 29
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
