Impeccably shot—every frame composed with an eye to natural light, shadow, and the framing of figures within a landscape—this is a film of endless wandering without fixed destination, a travelogue saturated with tourist hotspots—Rome’s Coliseum, Paris’s Eiffel Tower, Lisbon’s Belem Tower or Jeronimos Monastery, Finisterre, the western-most point in Europe—which serve as reminders of place and history whose protagonists feel themselves unmoored yet bound to history, time and the logics of itineraries, discoveries and destinations as the film’s two protagonists cross paths, follow or flee from each other across half a dozen European cities while half-conducting an illicit affair. In terms of narrative, mood, and the obsession with memory, the film clearly echoes Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amor especially), but as the title indicates, color and light are key to the films in very different ways to Resnais’ use of black and white’s shadowy contrasts. The film occurs almost exclusively outside, its characteristic movement seeing the protagonists walk through otherwise utterly deserted streets—shot in the glare of full sunlight, when others are hiding indoors, the midnight sun, or the gentler lights of dusk or dawn—in motions that are at once archly choreographed (the artifice emphasized by non-linear intercutting and the heightened affective states of classical music—Debussy’s La Mer is a key presence) and unfold at the pace of un-staged perambulation which, according to the normative expectations of film editing and movement, appears frustratingly slow. The film is, in one sense, dialogue-heavy—the two are near-constantly speaking to or across each other in diegetic sound and in voice over—but their words are slow, spaced out, as often ‘interior’ dialogue as externalised speech, and the film is punctuated by awkward silence, close-lipped wandering.
Given both the virtual who’s-who of European sights it presents, and its visual vocabulary—clearly manifesting the influence of Antonioni, Fellini, Resnais or early Varda—the film signals Europe at every turn. Yet it’s important to stress that this is a film shot of, shot in, but not within Europe. As such, it’s a fascinating reversal of the usual orientalism that manifests, say, in Anna Karina adopting a racist caricature at the same time as condemning the Vietnam war in Pierrot Le Fou: adopting the look, stylistics and existential mood of European art cinema, but from a consciously different perspective. Thus, while existing reviews stress the ‘European’ nature or influence of the film—the locations, the music, the visual sensibility—this is very much a film about Japan, as the dialogue makes abundantly clear: about the geographical displacement of trauma, the gap illustrated literally in one of the film’s most visually arresting shots, as the protagonists face each other across a mosaic world map, the mid-day sun casting continental shadows over its schematic, simplifying representation of a complex totality.
The burden of European influence manifested in the film’s visual and stylistic sensibility is the very centre of its narrative drama. Rather than the existential alienation of the European bourgeoisie so famously depicted by Antonioni or Fellini in their own films of heterosexual wandering—for which the devastation of the second world war was a kind of vague, discomforting underlay—this film is explicitly about Japan-specific trauma: the explosion of the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki two decades before. That this drama is ‘peripheral’ to the narrative (there’s nothing like the opening sequences of Hiroshima Mon Amour to slam home to viewers the existence of the nuclear massacres) is part of its argument. Makoto searches for the original European model for a church destroyed in the Nagasaki bombings, through a drawing glimpsed in the Nagasaki museum; Naoko has fled to Europe precisely in order to flee the memory of Nagasaki. In a sense, they are in Europe for opposite reasons, yet in another sense, they are drawn to a moment before loss, whether realising that moment to be impossible, and fleeing from everything that reminds them of it, or seeking something prior to it: a kind of impossible double immersion in memory. Both are representatives of a modern, upwardly-mobile class: polylingual, studying or working in business abroad, yet they don’t so much dream of a transformed future as wander in alienated displacement activities from an irresolvable trauma.
That’s one element: the other, closer to the surface of the film, its exploration of the structures of desire and domesticity, is Yoshida’s critique of sexual normativity. In a 1970 interview for Cahiers du Cinema coinciding with the release of his next, and probably best-known film, Eros Plus Massacre, Yoshida castigated Kurosawa for his avocation of stoicism (born, he thinks, in the jingoistic militarism of the former imperial regime) for his naïve faith in ‘postwar humanism’ (an American import, tied to the myth of democracy shattered by the Korean War). If Japan’s past suggests an ugly strain of imperialist nationalism—explored in the third of Yoshida’s trilogy of radicalism, Coup D’Etat—and its present an uneasy futurity represented by US occupation and capitalism, with Europe as a kind of cultural repository, way station (or mausoleum). Yoshida suggested to Cahiers that the destruction of three elements—the monogamous couple, the family, and the state—were the basis of societal transformation: hence his interest in the life and theories of the radical anarchist Osugi Sakae in Eros. Faced with studio interference for his earlier dramatisations of class conflict, Yoshida’s subsequent cycle of ‘anti-melodramas’—of which Farewell is one of the last—turn to romantic and sexual relationship, to blackmail, illicit affairs, love triangles, all the guilt and pain that undercuts the dream of the heterosexual couple form, as the beginnings of a political analysis (much as Ozu’s films address the crisis of the family in post-war Japan). Various characters in Farewell offer ‘love’ as the solution into which they have displaced other activities—whether Makoto’s claim that Naoko is his the true ‘cathedral’ he’s been searching for (marrying her and returning to Japan will solve his quest, his frustration at the ‘rat race’, his cultural insecurity), or her husband Robert’s insistence, at once ironised and sincere, that true love is one which can be faked over time, a matter of development rather than initial passion. Yet the affair is forever caught in the trappings of old roles: patriarchal possessiveness and relinquishment, the emergence of the triangle and the switch to a second couple, the slow-burning breakdown of a marriage, the oscillation between romantic idealisation and pragmatic acceptance of an absence of love as a necessary evil.
Both protagonists—a younger university student who ultimately decides to study urban sociology in Paris, moving from an obsession with the past towards some conceptualisation of the future, and a businesswoman, the wife of an American import-export boss who lives in Paris and travels Europe buying art and furniture—seek to escape Japan, whether as seat of deep-rooted trauma and the loss of memory (the businesswoman’s loss of her entire family during the Nagasaki bombing) or of a frustrated rat-race conformity. The ostensible purposes for Makoto’s trip—which locates him first of all in Portugal—is the dream of locating the European prototype for a cathedral built during the Portugese ‘discovery’ of Japan,
It was at the Nagasaki Museum. I found a sketch of an old plan of a building built in Nagasaki, 400 years ago, in a Western style. The history of the persecution of Christians has destroyed this building, not leaving any trace of it. This sketch is infused with the tenacity of the first veterans who, 400 years ago, fought on Japanese soil, on what was for them the end of the world. This moved me deeply. The model of the cathedral must still be in Europe.
Naoko, meanwhile, seeks instead to move away from memory, dream or goal, closing her heart as it makes it easier to do her work, ultimately leaving her husband, who gives her his blessing to go to Makoto, but deciding to remain unmoored to either, dreaming of returning to Japan but seeing only a void. Replacing one kind of idealism—the search for the original cathedral—with another—deciding that the ‘cathedral’ he’s searching for is, in fact, Naoko—Makoto ultimately returns to Japan, though with a plan to study urban sociology in Paris (as Naoko drily remarks, he, too, has his eye on the future).
Early on in the film, Makoto opines that their meeting—a detour from the expected route—is of value not merely for its present pleasures, but as a means of consciously building up memories, like a tourist snapshot, a memento, a journal entry to be poured over in the future as proof of experience: “This will remain a good memory”. Naoko demurs demurs--“This memory may be injured”--to which Makoto responds, “Memories do not betray. It’s mankind that betrays memories”. This notion of a pure memory, in which one can in the present perfectly recall the truth of the past, is romanticised, grants memory itself a kind of super-human function. Is such memory collective, or individual? How to balance the two sides to one story? Such philosophical questions occur more in elliptical fragments than as extended rumination—though they constitute much of the unspoken substance of the film’s voiceovers. The most explicit engagement with these questions occurs during one of the film’s few interior scenes, and one of the few to feature other actors. Makoto’s visit to Nakoto’s Parisian family home, an English language discussion (in which French performers are overlaid with atrociously stilted American dubbing) between her husband Bob and his sister, Mary, concerning the nature of love and reality. For Bob, this is framed in terms at once cynical and quasi-theological. On the one hand, he gives vent to the frustrations of the bourgeoisie, for whom the world has become one of ‘fake’ values in which humans are caught in the proverbial ‘rat race’. On the other, he proclaims that ‘true love’ comes only from God; human love is merely a replica. Bob bemoans the fake, yet he opines that a ‘forged’ love may last longer than a true love precisely because of its false nature. At the same time, if the performance of (say) domestic commitment, or the salvific nature of human (heterosexual) love, is that which enables one to survive, he also has an empiricist obsession with truth and falsity. Bob’s absolutism is illustrated with the bathetic example of two pipes (shades, perhaps, of Magritte’s ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’)—asserts “If this [one] is real, that [one] is not real. If that is real, this is not real.” Likewise, Bob’s sister, Mary, is obsessed with apparently inconsequential aesthetic judgment—which of two chateaux is ‘more beautiful’—opines that “it is love that gives judgment on everything”. Worrying away at Bob’s resistance, she asserts (with a good deal of Orientalist projection): “God sees no difference between two [objects] that are the same, but it is very important for me to know which is myself. It is just like a catechism in Zen Buddhism.” This sense, on the one hand, of purely personal knowledge and of a kind of divine sanction ruling everything conveniently explains away history, the real contradictions of international capital, the pressures of bourgeois marriage, as even the silence of the other characters in the scene—in denial at their class position, but acutely aware of their alienation and unhappiness—exemplifies.
The quest for knowledge, for disentangling broader past histories and the romantic dilemmas of the present—“knowing which is which”, in other words—constitutes much of the film’s drama, at least from Makoto’s perspective. Yet, for all Makoto’s proclamations about the necessity of seeking out and understanding the past, of being faithful to memory, both characters also consciously seek to avoid memory. Both come to Europe for opposite reason: Makoto’s quest for the cathedral, as in some sense the root of ‘modern’ Japan, that which binds two sides of the world to each other (as in the extraordinary shot of the protagonists facing each other across a mosaic world map), and Naoko’s to escape the traumatic memory of Nagaski, which is nonetheless for her emblematised in the exact same object. Neither Makoto’s optimistic quest for that which, in the past, will offer the keys to the future, nor Naoko’s constant attempt to escape the past, are adequate responses to the histories of violence, conquest, and empire(s) those stories incarnate. If Naoko ultimately leaves her husband—the influx of the American occupation and the introduction of US-style capitalism—she will not seek an alternative in her younger Japanese lover. Mise-en-scene is key to this argument: the near-constant visibility of spectacularised ruins, shot in always-beautifully composed long shot—which at first seems a kind of tourist board travelogue—is part of the film’s argument about the ways that the very visibility of the past, of history, conceals and congeals false narratives that justify, prettify and aestheticise power and domination as art objects to be collected, backdrops to vacation or business destinations to tick off the list. The very year that student uprisings rocked both Europe and Japan—as the film’s title card emphasizes with its temporal marker—Yoshida shoots Paris, Lisbon, Rome as waste-lands devoid of anyone but the protagonists. No cops, no military, no workers or students; simply the networks that string travellers from metropolis to metropolis—cafes, airports, shops, historical sites—and the basics of the melodramatic plot, the unbalanced tension between the couple and the one who disrupts their union.
If both are trapped in a past—Naoko, in the film’s final scenes, reveals that she knew all along where the cathedral was located, and describes seeing it during a sunset a horrific echo of the atom bomb explosion over Nagasaki (its own kind of ‘summer light’). For Naoko the cathedral (which she sketches in lipstick on the pristine white of a café table) is ‘my Nagasaki’—a point of suppressed, but ever-present origin, and of impossible return; for Maokoto, the dream of locating the European prototype for a cathedral built during the Portugese ‘discovery’ of Japan raises the hope of conceiving a relation to the ‘west’ based on discovery, hope and promise rather than war, massacre and occupation. But both, in that sense, are Nagasaki: in a retrospective interview on the film, Yoshida goes so far as to claim that Naoko cannot return to Japan with Makoto because she has been “irradiated in Nagasaki” – she is Nagasaki. This apparent contradiction--Naoko has both been destroyed in Nagasaki and become Nagaski itself--is at the heart of the film. The logic of person as synecdoche for place manifests, on the one hand, in the racialised projections heaped onto the foreign traveller--that which might necessitate Naoko's claim that she has become "Japanese without being Japanese". But, given the relative absence of non-European figures within the film (instead reduced to background detail in a subtle reversal of the usual colonial travelogue), person as synecdoche as place serves more as Makoto's desire that a person might provide compensation, replacement for broader social cohesion, the couple form as the place where the ruins of a broader society might be gathered.
In the film’s final tableau, the lovers wander the ruins of the Coliseum, then part ways, as Naoko—having just declared her love for Makoto in the film’s sole montage, one of the few instances where the lovers’ interactions exhibit spontaneity, warmth and laughter—announces (once more) that she will never see him again, and he heads the airport, a characteristic high-framed long shot showing the minute figures drawing every further apart next to yet another body of water. This could have been the closing shot, but it’s not: for now Makoto encounters the ‘new Rome’—the possibility of building on, from or over the ruins of the past which nonetheless loom as preserved ruins in the centre of the modern metropolis (with obvious echoes of Nagaski). Half-ecstatic, half-panicked, his voiceover asks: “who builds this town? And the ancient Rome, will it disappear? Yes, without doubt. But what will not be destroyed? Our love?” Makoto’s leading questions—which once again seem to impart romantic love with the quasi-theological tenets with which Bob imparted it, and to analogise the construction of an international city with the ‘building’ of a love relationship—set over the swelling waves of Debussy’s La Mer, are bathetically undercut as Yoshida abruptly cuts off music and image to depict Naoko alone in a café, drawing the fated cathedral on a pristine white table with blood-red lipstick. The film’s denouement proper—at once climax and bathetic coda—intercuts Makoto’s progression through the airport with Naoko (once more to the strains of Debussy), wavering between giving chase and remaining where she is, left perpetually circling the fountains of Rome in a kind of riposte to the fantasies of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and calling out the film’s last word, "taxi!”, while remaining stock still. This ending seems to send up the tension of the romantic drama—particularly that set in airports, train stations, spaces of arrival and departure—between the ‘inevitable’ (the return to domestic partner, place of origin, or new beginning, breaking the temporary spell of romantic infatuation for the cold reality of continuing life) and the wish-fulfilment fantasy of film’s ‘happy ending’ (the resolution of contradiction in an impulsive gesture and a burst of music, frozen in time). A frequent movement in the film sees one or the other of the two protagonists suddenly stop, leaving the other behind, before a sudden, panicked burst as they run to catch up: most notably, the shot of Makoto in front of an empty traffic intersection in Stockholm, the road signs, with their multiple directional indicators, as a kind of wilfully obvious metaphorical tool that, likewise, reaches towards parody, as well as the serendipity of the film’s spontaneous shooting methods.
Makoto seeks in the cathedral and in Naoko a way out of the obliquely-hinted dilemma of uncertain placement in a newly-developing Japanese society, dominated, as Yoshida has it, by the false ‘democracy’ and ‘humanism’ of American occupation. If his search is initially for the obliterated roots of modern Japan—a former imperial adventure (that of Portugal) whose traces (the Nagaski church) are in themselves destroyed by modern imperialism (the atom bomb and subsequent occupation)—he comes to see its fulfilment in a figure of the present, in the dreams of the domestic (as compensation, perhaps, for the breakdown in traditional familial structure so memorably charted by Ozu) rather than national narratives and utopian projects. This is also a patriarchal narrative of heterosexual rescue (marry me! We’ll return to Japan!), constructed as inevitability, support and futurity: as sign of maturity, of the reassurances of male power (even in the more apparently emancipated form of modern relationship). Meanwhile, Naoko’s rejection of the demands of love (conceived as domestic or binding relationship), elided in some senses with her inability to return to Japan, is inevitably deferred. The ex-pat, continent-travelling of the bourgeois business world—as a purchaser, one constantly buys good, accumulating in a kind of endless quest for more accumulation, buying that which is vintage or that which is most modern and chic in a kind of surface play with history as commodity—skims the surface in a kind of parody of internationalism. Yet to return to Japan as housewife (or in a continuing import-export role) would be no less false than the loveless relationship with Bob. Alienated by the inadequacies of the couple form as solution to trauma, and without a politics to provide a broader collective narrative and material analysis, Naoko must, as she put it earlier, “walk throughout Europe […] until death”.
Of course, ‘Europe’ at the time the film was shot was hardly just a succession of tourist post-cards. In the countries where the film was shot, social democratic governments, Fascist dictatorships and the like all faced the push from the left in the now-totemic May Day protests. The film ends with the title ‘summer 1968’, and it’s implied that the student may have some connection to political radicalism—a French poster against the cops on the wall of an apartment. Yoshida would follow this film—the latest in a length series of what have become known as ‘anti-melodramas’ which, like Farewell, star his wife, actor Mariko Okada—with a trilogy on left-wing radicalism: Eros + Massacre, Heroic Purgatory, and Coup d’Etat a more explicit engagement with the entanglements of romance, eroticism and history in the complex and messy business of conceptualising new modes of social(ist)/anarchist relation and the violence imbricated with the attendant struggle for power. Here, however, little is spoken of politics or of a life outside the abstracted world of the tourist’s sojourn from the constraints of time, place and routine, the comforting alienation of wandering in a place where you don’t speak the language. This is precisely the point. The jet-setting role of the international bourgeoisie—whether in business or the intelligentsia—pretends to erase national distinctions (Americans in Paris, Japanese in Europe, Americans in Japan, and so on) in ways that only underscore the collaborative nature of international capital in conjunction (and occasional contradiction) with the racist nationalism of state power. The quests of both characters may displace the trauma of Nagasaki, yet their presence, as fellow Japanese in a world of Europeans, see them alienated from the trappings of European history and culture that so ostentatiously loom over the characters, and they cannot help but remind themselves of the land they’ve left behind. “It is always like that when I meet a Japanese abroad”, muses Naoko in the voiceover describing their first meeting. “Me, I am Japanese without being Japanese.” “You seemed so deeply to appreciate this conversation in Japanese”, Makoto responds. “No, to escape my own appearance, I started a disjointed conversation”. It’s perhaps too easy to read this ‘disjointed conversation’ as a formal analogue for the film itself—whether that conversation be between the protagonists, between Europe and Japan, past and present, the intimacies of human romantic relation and the abstractions of historical artefacts. Yoshida notes that the voiceover in part arose from working methods—the entire film was shot with a five person crew (Yoshida, the two actors, and two technicians, along with local assistance), as a mobile unit moving across the seven countries where the film was shot with only the briefest skeleton of a scenario, improvising with location, action and dialogue as they went (and in that sense enacting the constant, yet desultory movement of the scenario itself). Overlaying so much of the film in Duras-like dialogic voiceover may emphasize the ‘interiors’, the inner voices of the characters—an impossible dialogue of all that lies unspoken—but at the same time, even here, much lies unspoken. The ways of repression run deep; what’s spoken even in thought is carefully composed, arranged, full of hints and suggestions, and sometimes, of sudden revelations, but too invested in self-protection to fully vent what lies beneath.
No comments:
Post a Comment