Cries and Whispers (1972)

AKA Viskningar och rop

Director:
Ingmar Bergman

Writer:
Ingmar Bergman

Cries and Whispers takes place in a lavish mansion in the 1800s, filled with red carpets and white statuary. It depicts the final days of Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is near-death with cancer. Her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) have returned to the family home to be with her. They remain distant and awkward, and struggle to comfort their sister, while dealing with shock and the fear of mortality her death is bringing to them. The deeply religious maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), whose own daughter died young, is able to comfort her. At length, Agnes dies, and a priest (Anders Ek) arrives at her death bed she returns to the living for a short moment. In a dream-like sequence she asks her family for love and care. For a moment Karin, Maria and the dead Agnes are getting closer to each other, only to be even more distant shortly afterwards. Only Anna is able to embrace and mourn the dead. The film is characterized by flashbacks that return to the life of the protagonists and their memories, tracing each woman's personality to the childhood they spent together. Maria remembers her failed marriage; Agnes remembers her unrequited devotion to their distant mother; Karin struggles with self-harm.

The last flashback, from the deceased Agnes' point of view, is narrated with her diary, and shows her sisters descending upon the house clad in white, like angels. The last words are Agnes whispering "Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069467/

A City of Sadness (1989)

AKA 悲情城市 (bēiqíng chéngshì)

Directed by
Hsiao-hsien Hou

Writing credits
T'ien-wen Chu
Nien-Jen Wu

The film depicts the Lin family's experiences during the White Terror. The eldest brother Wen-Heung (Sung Young Chen) is murdered by a Shanghai mafia boss, the middle brother Wen-Leung (Jack Kao) suffers a traumatic brain injury in a KMT jailhouse, and the youngest brother Wen-Ching (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), who is both deaf and mute, hopes to flee to the mountains with his friend to fight in the anti-KMT resistance movement. By the end of the film even the photographer Wen-Ching has been arrested by the authorities, leaving only his wife to tell the story of the family's destruction.

Wen-Ching's deafness began as an expedient to disguise Tony Leung's inability to speak Taiwanese (or Japanese - the language taught in Taiwan's schools during the 51 year occupation), but wound up being an effective means to demonstrate the brutal insensitivity of Chen Yi's ROC administration.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096908/

The Man Without a Past (2002)

AKA Mies vailla menneisyyttä

Directed by
Aki Kaurismäki

Writing credits
Aki Kaurismäki

The film begins with an unnamed man arriving by train to Helsinki. After falling asleep in Kaisaniemi park, he is mugged and beaten by hoodlums and is severely injured in the head, losing consciousness. He awakes and wanders back to the train station and collapses in its bathroom. He awakes the second time in a hospital and finds that he has lost his memory. He starts his life from scratch, living in container dwellings, finding clothes with help from the Salvation Army and making friends with the poor.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311519/

Buffalo '66 (1998)

Directed by
Vincent Gallo

Writing credits
Vincent Gallo

Having just served five years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Billy Brown (Vincent Gallo) kidnaps a young tap dancer named Layla (Christina Ricci) and forces her to pretend to be his wife. Layla allows herself to be kidnapped and it is clear she is romantically attracted to Billy from the start, but Billy all the while is compelled to deal with his own demons, his loneliness and his depression.

The subplot of Billy seeking revenge on the man indirectly responsible for his imprisonment, Scott Wood, is a reference to a former Buffalo Bills kicker, Scott Norwood, who missed the game-winning field goal in Super Bowl XXV against the New York Giants in 1991.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118789/

Rashomon (1950)

AKA Rashômon

Directed by
Akira Kurosawa        

Writing credits
Ryûnosuke Akutagawa (stories Rashomon and In a Grove)
Shinobu Hashimoto
Akira Kurosawa

 

The film depicts the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband, through the widely differing accounts of four witnesses, including the bandit/rapist, the wife, the dead man speaking through a medium (Fumiko Honma), and lastly the narrator, the one witness that seems the most objective and least biased. While the stories are mutually contradictory only the final version is unmotivated by other factors. Accepting the final version as the truth (the now common technique of film and TV of only explaining the truth last was not a universal approach at that time) explains why in each other version "the truth" was worse than admitting to the killing, and it is precisely this assessment which gives the film its power, and this theme which is echoed in other works.

The story unfolds in flashback as the four characters—the bandit Tajōmaru (Toshirō Mifune), the samurai's wife (Machiko Kyō), the murdered samurai (Masayuki Mori), and the nameless woodcutter (Takashi Shimura)—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. The first three versions are told by the priest (Minoru Chiaki), who was present at the trial as a witness, having bumped into the couple on the road just prior to the events. Each of these versions has a response of "lies" from the woodcutter. The final version comes direct from the woodcutter, as the only witness (but he did not admit this to the court). All versions are told to a ribald commoner (Kichijiro Ueda) as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined gatehouse identified by a sign as Rashōmon.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/

The Holy Mountain (1973)

AKA La montaña sagrada

Director:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writer:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

A man (later identified as a thief) representing The Fool, a tarot card typically depicting a young man stepping off a cliff, lies on the ground with flies covering his face like excrement. He is befriended by a footless, handless dwarf (representing the five of swords: defeat) and goes into a city to make money from tourists. The thief's resemblance to Christ inspires some to use his likeness for the crucifixes that they sell by casting an impression of his face and body. After a dispute with a priest who rejects the thief's likeness of himself, the thief eats off the face of his wax statue and sends it skyward with balloons, symbolically eating the body of Christ and offering "himself" up to heaven. Soon after, he notices a crowd gathered around a large tower, where a large hook with a bag of gold has been sent down in exchange for food. The thief, wishing to find the source of the gold, ascends the tower; finding the alchemist (played by Jodorowsky).

After a confrontation with the alchemist, the thief defecates into a container. The excrement is transformed into gold by the alchemist who proclaims: "You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold." The thief is introduced to seven people who are said to be the most powerful but who, like the thief, are mortal. They are related to the planets in astrological terms and portrayed with broad-brush satire, each personifying the worst aspects of his or her planet's supposed characteristics. The seven consist of: a cosmetics manufacturer, a weapons manufacturer, a millionaire art dealer, a war toy maker, a political financial adviser, a police chief and an architect. They are gathered together by the alchemist who instructs them to burn their money and wax images of themselves.

After several scenes wherein the characters are led by the alchemist through several death/rebirth rituals, they all journey to Lotus Island to gain the secret of immortality from nine immortal masters who live on a holy mountain. Once on Lotus Island they are sidetracked by the "Pantheon Bar", a cemetery party where people have abandoned their quest for the holy mountain and instead engage in drugs, poetry or acts of physical prowess. Leaving the bar behind, they ascend the mountain and each have personal symbolic visions representing each characters worst fears and obsessions. Near the top, the thief is sent back to his "people" along with a young prostitute and an ape who has followed him to the mountain. The rest confront the cloaked immortals who are shown to be only faceless dummies. The alchemist then reveals the film apparatus just outside the frame (cameras, microphone, lights and crew) and says "Zoom back camera!" Instructing everyone, including the audience for the film, to leave the holy mountain. "Real life awaits us," he says, and the movie ends.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071615/

Nostalghia (1983)

AKA Ностальгия

Director:
Andrey Tarkovskiy

Writers:
Andrei Tarkovsky
Tonino Guerra

The opening scene is a single shot showing a family and their dog descending a hill, a large tree in the foreground, the distant countryside vanishing into the rolling fog. The camera pushes in imperceptibly, but continuously from the beginning. On the soundtrack, possibly diegetic, a sole woman sings. Meanwhile, the film credits scroll up, superimposed over the scene. The family and dog, upon reaching the area in front of a hut, stop moving. Verdi's Messa da Requiem fades in, overlapping for a brief moment with the woman singing. Once the foreground tree fully disappears, the scene freezes; the credits continue until the title appears, and the scene fades to black. The Requiem continues an audible transition to the second scene.

The Russian writer Andrei Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) travels to Italy to research the life of 18th-century Russian composer Pavel Sosnovsky, who lived there and committed suicide after his return to Russia. He and his comely interpreter travel to a convent in the middle of the Tuscan countryside where they look at frescoes by Piero della Francesca. Back at their hotel Andrei feels displaced and longs to go back to Russia, but unnamed circumstances seem to get in the way. The interpreter is smitten with Andrei and is offended that he will not sleep with her, claiming that she has a better boyfriend waiting for her.

Andrei meets and befriends a strange madman, who is famous in the village for his insistence in trying to walk across a drained mineral spring pool with a lit candle. He claims that when finally achieving it, he will save the world. They both share a feeling of alienation from their surroundings. The madman says, while playing Beethoven's 9th Symphony, that mathematics are wrong, that 1+1 does not equal 2 but a bigger 1, and illustrates it with two drops of olive oil. Andrei later learns that this man used to live in a lunatic asylum until the post-fascist state closed them and now lives in the street. He also learns that this man had a family and was obsessed in keeping them inside his house to save them from the end of times until they were freed by the police.

During an abstract dream-like sequence, Andrei sees himself as the madman and has visions of his wife, the interpreter and the Madonna as being all one and the same. Andrei seems to cut his research short and plans to leave for Russia, until he gets a call from his interpreter who wishes to say goodbye and tell him that she met the madman in Rome by chance and that he wanted Andrei to walk across the pool himself. The interpreter is with her boyfriend, but he seems equally uninterested in her and appears to be involved in dubious business affairs. Andrei goes to the drained pool. His attempt to walk from one side of the pool to the other proves more difficult than he imagines. It remains unclear if the fumes, his poor heart condition or both impede him from achieving his task. Meanwhile, the madman is giving a speech in the city about the need of mankind of being true brothers and sisters and to stop polluting the water. He plays Beethoven's 9th Symphony and sets himself on fire. During this time Andrei has been unsuccessful in crossing over the pond. When he finally achieves it, he dies.

The closing sequence is a close up of Andrei sitting with his dog in the countryside of the opening scene. As the camera slowly pulls out, the hut and his family are shown to be inside the ruins of an Italian church.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086022/

The Mirror (1975)

AKA Зеркало

Directed by
Andrei Tarkovsky        

Writing credits
Aleksandr Misharin
Andrei Tarkovsky
Arseni Tarkovsky (poems)

In a larger context, The Mirror depicts the thoughts and emotions of Alexei (Ignat Daniltsev) and the world surrounding him. The structure of the film is discontinuous and non-chronological, without a conventional plot, and combines childhood memories with newsreel footage. The film switches between three different times, the prewar time, the wartime and the postwar 1960s.

The film starts with Alexei's son Ignat (also played by Ignat Daniltsev) switching on a television set and watching the examination of a stutterer by a physician. In the next scene, set in the countryside in the prewar time, Alexei's mother Maria (Margarita Terekhova) is talking with a passing-by doctor (Anatoli Solonitsyn). The exterior and the interior of the house are shown and a barn on fire. In a dream sequence Maria is washing her hair. Set in the postwar time, in the 1960s Alexei is talking with his mother Maria on the phone, while the interior of a house is shown. Switching to the prewar time, the mother Maria is shown at her work as a proofreader at the printing press. She is worrying about a mistake she may have overlooked, but is comforted by her colleague Lisa (Alla Demidova), who then reduces her to tears with withering criticism.

Back in the postwar time, Alexei quarrels with his wife Natalia (also played by Margarita Terekhova), who has divorced him and is living with his son Ignat. This is followed by scenes from the Spanish Civil War and the ascent of a balloon in the USSR. In the next scene the same apartment is shown, with a strange woman (Tamara Ogorodnikova) sitting in one room. Ignat reads a letter by Alexander Pushkin and receives a telephone call from his father Alexei. Switching to the wartime, Alexei is shown during rifle training, intercut by newsreel footage of the Sino-Soviet border conflict and World War II. In the next scene, the reunion of the children with the father (Oleg Yankovsky) after the end of the war is shown. The film then returns to the quarrel between Alexei and his wife Natalia in the postwar 1960s. Switching to the prewar time, the house and the surrounding countryside are again shown, intercut by a dreamlike sequence showing a levitating mother. The film then switches to the postwar time, showing Alexei on his deathbed. The final scene plays in the prewar time, showing a pregnant mother Maria, intercut by scenes showing Maria young and old (the old Maria is played by Tarkovsky's mother Maria Vishnyakova).

The Mirror draws heavily on Tarkovsky's own childhood. Childhood memories such as the evacuation from Moscow to the countryside during the war, the withdrawn father and his own mother, who worked as a proofreader in a printing press feature prominently in the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072443/

Away with Words (1999)

AKA San tiao ren; Kujaku

Directed by
Christopher Doyle

Writing credits
Christopher Doyle
Tony Rayns

The protagonist is Asano who has had an amazing memory since his youth spent in Okinawa. Words have tangible shapes, tastes and colours for him. This goes so far that he is not even able to forget words once he has heard them. He travels the seas and because 'Hong Kong' feels wonderful, he goes ashore there. He chances upon the Dive Bar, that soon turns out to be the haven of comfort he has been seeking since his youth. The bar is run by the flamboyant, hospitable Kevin, who is also an alcoholic, eclectic lover and a perfect confidant to Asano. But Kevin keeps forgetting all kinds of things and that gets him into trouble sometimes. Words seem only to stand in the way of the relationship between Asano and Kevin...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213469/

Early Summer (1951)

AKA Bakushû

Director:
Yasujirô Ozu

Writers:
Kôgo Noda
Yasujirô Ozu

Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a secretary in Tokyo, lives in the extended Mamiya family at Kamakura, Kanagawa, which includes her parents Shukichi and Shige (Ichirô Sugai and Chieko Higashiyama), her elder doctor brother Koichi (Chishu Ryu), his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), and their two young sons Minoru (Zen Murase) and Isamu (Isao Shirosawa).

An elderly uncle (Kokuten Kodo) arrives from the provinces to visit Tokyo, and reminds everyone that Noriko is at an age where she should marry. At work, Noriko's boss Satake (Shûji Sano) recommends a match for her involving a forty-year-old friend, Mr Manabe, who is a businessman and an avid golfer. Her other friends are divided into two groups—the married and the unmarried—who tease one another endlessly, with Aya Tamura (Chikage Awashima) her close ally in the unmarried group.

The Mamiya family applies gentle pressure on Noriko to accept the match proposed by Satake. However, when childhood friend Kenkichi Yabe (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi), a doctor widower with a young girl, is posted to Akita, his mother Tami (Haruko Sugimura) impulsively asks Noriko to marry Kenkichi and follow them in their northward resettlement. To Tami's surprise, Noriko agrees. When Noriko reveals her decision to her family, the Mamiya family is quietly devastated. Unable to pressure her into dropping the match, which they think is a poor one owing to Kenkichi's widower status, they have to slowly re-adjust themselves to this decision.

The family now accepts Noriko's choice with quiet resignation and before Noriko moves on, the family has a last photoshoot together. Noriko's parents console themselves that Noriko and Kenkichi will move back to Tokyo in a few years' time, and the family will be reunited. Meanwhile, the parents shall move to a rural region to stay with Noriko's elderly uncle. The movie ends with a shot of a barley field ripening, which signifies the season the film is set in, early summer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043313/

Dolls (2002)

AKA ドールズ (Dōruzu)

Director:
Takeshi Kitano

Writer:
Takeshi Kitano 

The film features three primary sets of characters, each within their own distinct story:

-A young man (Matsumoto, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima) who rejects his engagement to his fiancée (Sawako, played by Miho Kanno) to marry the daughter of his company's president. When his former fiancée attempts suicide and ends up in a semi-vegetative state, he takes her out of the hospital and they run away.

-Another young man (Nukui, played by Tsutomu Takeshige) is obsessed with the pop-star Haruna (played by Kyoko Fukada); he blinds himself when she is involved in a disfiguring car accident.

-An aged yakuza (Hiro, played by Tatsuya Mihashi), who tries to meet a girlfriend from his youth (played by Chieko Matsubara).

These stories do have some incidental visual cross-over with each other in the film, but are mostly separate. The first story is the one the film centers on. The film leads into it by opening with a performance of Bunraku theatre, and closes with a shot of dolls from the same. The performance is that of "The Courier for Hell" by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and it alludes to themes that reappear later in the film. Because the rest of the film itself (as Kitano himself has said) can be treated as Bunraku in film form, the film is quite symbolic. In some cases, it is not clear whether a particular scene is meant to be taken literally. The film is also not in strict chronological order, but there is a strong visual emphasis on the changing of the seasons and the bonds of love over the progression of time (Matsumoto and Sawako spend most of the film physically connected by a red rope).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0330229/

Vive L'Amour (1994)

AKA 愛情萬歲 (Aiqing wansui)

Directed by
Ming-liang Tsai

Writing credits
Ming-liang Tsai        
Yi-chun Tsai        
Pi-ying Yang

Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), a young salesman, discovers a key to an apartment in its lock and takes it. He soon moves into one of the bedrooms, and one night he attempts to commit suicide by slitting his wrists while lying on the bed.

Meanwhile, Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung) is drinking coffee at a cafe when a beautiful real estate agent, May Lin (Yang Kuei-Mei), sits at the table next to his. Intrigued, he follows her as she walks down the street. Lin catches on and eventually joins him. She leads him to a vacant apartment that she is trying to sell — the same apartment that Hsiao-kang is staying in — and they have sex in one of the bedrooms. Hsiao-kang hears them and stops the bleeding from his wrists.

Ah-jung steals the key to the apartment from Lin and later returns with his belongings. He moves into one of the adjoining bedrooms. That night, he and Hsiao-kang encounter each other in the apartment and have a short argument.

May Lin spends her day trying to sell property. While taking a break, she returns to the apartment when Hsiao-kang and Ah-jung are both there. The two sneak out quietly together and soon form a friendship.

One night, Hsiao-kang goes out for a walk and meets Ah-jung selling dresses on the street. May Lin walks past but does not notice them. Soon, Ah-jung joins her at a food stand and the two return to the apartment and sleep together in the same room as they did the first time. Unbeknownst to them, Hsiao-kang is hiding under the bed as they arrive, and he masturbates as the bed creaks above him.

The next morning, May Lin gets dressed and leaves. Hsiao-kang lies next to the sleeping Ah-jung and kisses him before slowly pulling away. Lin goes to her car but cannot start it and instead walks on a pathway near some construction sites. She then sits down on a bench and starts to cry uncontrollably.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109066/