A creepy family portrait
Writer-director Kôji Fukada works the Lynchian divide between normality and nightmare in stylish Harmonium
HARMONIUM
Starring Kanji Furutachi. In Japanese, with English subtitles
Mousily bearded Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) 2
doesn’t say much, whether he’s working in his sheet-metal shop in a quiet corner of Tokyo or having dinner with his neglected wife, Akié (Mariko Tsutsui), and their preteen daughter, Hotaru (Momone Shinokawa). But the family’s fault lines are exposed when we see Dad reading the paper while Mom and daughter say grace.
Of course, their pleasant chat about how certain spiders eat their own mothers could be seen as disconcerting, and even Hotaru’s time spent practising the organlike instrument of the title is a little creepy. It looks plainly domestic while sounding like the soundtrack to a trip to an underground circus.
In the stylish Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada keeps working the Lynchian divide between the normal and the nightmarish, between polite formality and the subterranean id. This dichotomy comes into focus with the abrupt arrival of Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano), one of Toshio’s oldest friends, freshly released from prison. Yasaka is invited to live with the family, with no explanation to the rest of them.
The ex-con did something decidedly not okay, a perversion of “the framework of justice I had built for myself”. With his rigidly upright posture and buttoned-up dress clothes, Yasaka is a hit with Mom and daughter. He presents himself as a compulsive truth-teller. But his presence is that of a quiet snake in what’s already no garden of Eden. And Dad isn’t telling everything, either.
The film’s binary approach cracks things right in the middle, when a new (largely unexplained) crisis happens, and the tale jumps ahead about eight years. Yasaka’s no longer on the scene, but the family is in even deeper peril. Still, Toshio seems much more engaged now. The filmmaker keeps a cool distance, however, and Harmonium wavers between elegantly composed long shots and flights of magic-realistic fancy. It’s a tightly controlled storytelling gambit that pays off, even if Fukada’s off-key tendency to keep messing with the audience grows slightly wearying by the fadeto-black ending.
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THE B-SIDE: ELSA DORFMAN’S PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY
A documentary by Errol Morris. Rated PG
Elsa Dorfman’s name is not on the lips of 2
your average photography collector and that’s pretty much the point of the latest from veteran provocateur Errol Morris (The Fog of War).
Among other heavy-duty threads connecting Morris’s work, the untrustworthiness of memory may be the sturdiest. Here, retrospection is made tangible through the sharp-eyed portraits of Elsa Dorfman, a perpetually jolly Massachusetts photographer who recently turned 80. The filmmaker
spends most of the doc’s swift 75 minutes in her cramped Cambridge studio, as she goes through past work on the eve of her retirement. It’s some archive! Moving to New York City in 1959, she took pictures as a way to hang around the scene at Grove Press, then a hotbed of poetry, political dissidence, and censorious upheaval.
Through Grove’s auspices, Dorfman—who calls herself “one lucky little Jewish girl”— captured timeless images of writers like W.H. Auden, Anaïs Nin, and especially Allen Ginsberg, with whom she forged a lifelong friendship. (Audiotape of his call just before dying is an emotional highlight of the mostly upbeat film.)
She was later able to shoot ’60s icons like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. But Dorfman never caught on with magazine editors or with gallerists, and instead went back to Cambridge and set up a moderately rewarding portrait business. Although she never received any financial support from Polaroid, she ended up owning one of only five 20x24 cameras they made, and the large-format portraits it yielded became her bread and butter.
Normally shooting two final images on the expensive film, she kept the rejects—the “B-sides” of the title. She also ended up with a stash of that Polaroid product, but now that it’s almost gone, Dorfman herself ends up a scratchy B-side of the lapsed century. But that’s not fair, Morris seems to argue. She was a hitmaker from the start.
> KEN EISNER THE BAD BATCH
Starring Suki Waterhouse. Rated 14A
Vhs-era fetishists will groove on The Bad 2
Batch as it coolly rips on a bunch of your favourite midnight movies. Sadly, its more ambitious aspects come with built-in tape glitch.
Insurgent’s Suki Waterhouse is Arlen, a waif in yellow short-shorts dumped in the film’s opening scenes inside a vast Texan desert walled off, Escape From New York–style, from the rest of civilization. Within minutes she’s kidnapped by cannibals and relieved of an arm and a leg. So far, so awesome.
Arlen escapes, of course, after some highly satisfying revenge violence, and makes her way to a sandblasted shantytown called Comfort, benevolently presided over by a puffy potentate in pristine white slacks called the Dream (Keanu Reeves, made up to look like Bob Guccione). He keeps a harem of pregnant women around to cook up the community’s drugs; not the worst form of soft control, all things being equal, and the resident DJ (Diego Luna) isn’t bad. Matters become a little less Comfort-able when the Dream adopts a six-yearold girl (Jayda Fink) who seems to have wandered in from the surrounding badlands, and Arlen is tapped to fetch her by the kid’s dad, Miami Man (Jason Momoa, Conan)—the fiercest but also the most soulful of those cannibals.
Writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour made a big impression with 2014’s Jarmusch-ean vampire flick A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and the vision here, augmented by more than a few songs from New York synth duo Darkside, is equally tooled for cult-movie-heads. What it lacks, besides a better performance from Waterhouse, is any confidence in its shading. The film wants ambiguity—not the kind of thing generally found in pulp—leaving us with unreadable characters and a distinct peteringout of tension. The last line (regarding some spaghetti) should land with a hard existential wallop, but instead it’s an eye-roller. Still, any film with the balls to cast an unrecognizable Jim Carrey as its symbolic moral centre has more than a little something going for it.
> ADRIAN MACK ABACUS: SMALL ENOUGH TO JAIL
A documentary by Steve James. Rating unavailable
Just when Americans finally began contemplating 2 to what degree their government had betrayed them in the Benedict Arnold sense, the U.S. House of Representatives passed yet another let’s-undo-obama’s-legacy bill with the Financial Choice Act, quietly removing regulations placed on Wall Street investors after the meltdown of 2008.
This move happened long after the completion of Abacus: Small Enough to Jail. The subtitle is a play on the phrase “too big to fail”, referring to huge banks like JP Morgan Chase, bailed out as Bush left office. And how many banks were held accountable for this bad-mortgage-fuelled disaster? Exactly one, and that’s the subject of the latest provocation from Steve James (Hoop Dreams).
The events here centre on one Thomas Sung, an immigrant from Shanghai who became one of the first see next page
homegrown lawyers in Manhattan’s insular Chinatown. After some years of dealing with banks, he noticed how rarely they made loans to locals, and so he changed careers and opened one of his own. Two of his four grown daughters followed his path. Their relative inexperience was revealed when they discovered at least one of their loan officers scamming on the side.
In the simply structured film, the eloquent Sung recalls how the decision to report the fraudulent loans came back to bite them after the regional district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., decided to make an example of his Abacus Federal Savings and Loan. Their bad-faith loans barely resembled those of the big boys, and this is why Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi and others argue that the small-potatoes aspect of the case made Abacus easy pickings.
The moderately suspenseful film is filled with ironies, large and small, starting with Mr. and Mrs. Sung’s long-time obsession with Jimmy Stewart’s idealistic banker in It’s a Wonderful Life. But really, the American Dream has always been the province of immigrants. Remember them?
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