Why Bakushu is presented as a
“Berlinale Classic”, I really don´t know. In the last 12 years
it was screened at this film festival only in retrospectives. But
than, who cares?
Among at least a dozen masterpieces, Bakushu
has a special place in my heart - and that for exactly 28 years!.It is a very paradox film: at first it is
even for Ozu a unique film. He “wanted to show the cycle
of life without any dramatic Ups and Downs”. The film
consists rather of a series of episodes, each of them as beautiful as
a haiku. In fact it is Ozu´s most radical narrative experiment. On
the other side it is as well one of his most accessible and most
charming film. I know it is meaningless to put one masterpiece of Ozu
against another one, but Bakushu (wrongly translated with Early
Summer) is exactly what Wenders once said about the films of Ozu, a
lost paradise of cinema”.
Most of Ozu´s films are about every
day life and every day characters but Bakushu has a slightly cosmic
dimension. The lines of sight in this film leads often to the heaven
(the old couple watches a balloon which got loose), the sight of the
mother to an undefinable direction until she accepts that one of her
sons who is missing in the war will never come back or the scene on the beach of the sea
with one of Ozu´s rare camera movements which literally simulates
the rotation of the earth. A likely moment we find as well at the end
of a film made in the same year, Jean Renoir´s masterpiece The
River.
Last but not least, Setsuko Hara who
passed away in September 2015 (maybe the Berlinale screening is
finally a homage to Setsuko Hara) offers here probably her finest
performance. Her Noriko in this film can be rebellious, she has a lot
of humour and she has the grace of the countess Almaviva in Mozart´s La Nozze de Figaro.
Bakushu is a film with a nearly uncanny
and perfect balance. Always when I remember this film (exactly 124
minutes) it becomes an own endless universe itself.
If there is a film in the history of
cinema which offers a sense for the transience of life than it is this
phenomenon Bakushu. Behind the banality of every moment one can
always feel the infinity.
One of my favorite moments (okay the
film seems to consists of favorite moments at all) is when the
grandfather makes a small walk to buy bird seed (!). He has to stop
at a railroad crossing. The crossing gates are closing, a train
passes by. With a sigh he sits on a stone and waits and we wait with
him. There is no describing of this moment which gives justice to the
impact it had on me. The force of the passing train seems to be the
equivalence of the force of the inexorable passing of time.
One reason that the universe of a film
by Ozu is always expanding beyond the limited length are the memories of the characters which go far back in time. And we are only privileged to see this temporary limited segment of
their life. Ozu tried this once again, once in Soshun in 1956 and
once in Akibiyori in 1960. The brother of Noriko who is missed in the
war is present in the memories of this family.
For what reason ever Bakushu is
screened at this festival under “Berlinale Classics” (a 4K
Digital restoration) , it offers one of the most precious gifts
cinema has ever originated.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Screenings
Mon Feb 15 Cinemaxx 8 19.30
Wed Feb 17,Cinemaxx 8 12.00
No comments:
Post a Comment