Something special here; and an international breakthrough for Japanese writer/director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Contemplative, but with typical Japanese restraint in behavior and personal issues upturned by flashes of melodrama told not seen. Including murder, infidelity, child abuse, landslide burial, unexpected loss of wife, mother, child; all in this decidedly quiet, even sedate film. Gasp-worthy ‘reveals’ that alter perspective & attitude with U-turn dramatic strategies not so far from Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, only here more organically contained. At first, theater actor/director husband and t.v. scripter wife seem in perfect harmony, but their symbiotic relationship has fissured, something we feel without being able to place. Even after we meet a young heartthrob actor from one of her projects. An ellipsis before we pick up the action, and much has changed. The husband, now alone, is directing Chekhov’s UNCLE VANYA in a multinational/multi-lingual production in Hiroshima (one actor speaks in extremely beautiful Korean sign-language), and he’s cast that very heartthrob actor as a most unlikely Vanya. Off-stage, the director has been assigned a young female driver for his long rides to and from his waterfront apartment. An initially frustrating experience he grows to like, even need. Along with other actors in the play and the theater staff, interplay charting the production’s growth is seen in parallel with the text of the play (mostly heard in the car on a cassette tape read by the director’s wife) commenting and clarifying on dark personal areas you had no idea might be covered in this form. Consistently illuminating, with shocks and earned emotional catharsis, shot in compositions as immaculate as the stage director’s prized red Saab 900. Stunningly held together and consistently involving over its three-hour length. Indeed, the time hardly noticed.
DOUBLE-BILL: Not a lot of laughs in Japan’s idea of Anton Chekhov! Post-modern in its use of (captioned) multiple languages, but elsewise very ‘50s sincere. UNCLE VANYA, like so much Chekhov, luckless on screen with the notable exception of Louis Malle’s rehearsal pic of Andre Gregory’s performing edition VANYA ON 42ND STREET/’94.
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