What Remains

It's been years, maybe even 8 or 9 years, since I went to a NY Fringe Festival show -- in fact I had pretty much forgotten about it altogether, but Banana was in a Fringe play so I went to see it, and I was surprised to discover that I knew several people involved in the production.

Inspired by the late great Ingmar Bergman's film Cries & Whispers (which I have not yet seen), what remains is the (stillness) of objects co-directed by Jill Samuels and Hillary Spector was an admirable homage-in-progress to the Swedish filmmaker and his brutal-beautiful modes of story-telling. The most successful way in which stillness captured the essence of cinema was its ingenious set designed by Paul Hudson. Between the audience and the performers/performance there was erected a wall comprised of lush red square panels, maybe 16 in all. These panels were suspended on a system of zipline tracks, and were easily manipulated to slide laterally by the performers. Through the carefully timed choreography, these panels slid from side to side, opening and closing windows into the action, replicating, as it were, an amazing experience of camera frame. The opening shot -- a wide angle shot of a bed-ridden woman struggling against the pain of disease and impending death. The bed moved from upstage to downstage, that is, from far to close to the red frame, creating the effect of the camera zooming in on the claustrophobic sickroom. These successive "shots" created by the shifting of panels were some of the most inventive devices I'd seen in a long time. Especially because then you could break the rules to do thing you can only do in the theater. For example, as two sisters have tea while discussing their 3rd sister's failing health, one of the women ever so casually drapes her wrist over the edge of the red frame -- and with that singular and simple gesture, pointing to the fragility of the rules of this world, and the inevitable fracture of normalcy that was to come.

Ironically enough, however, the astonishing creativity of the set design quite overshadowed the actual content of the play. The story vaguely follows the nuanced dynamics of two sisters waiting for their 3rd sister to die. There is a maid who dutifully cares for and loves the sick woman, and there is a young doctor with whom one of the healthy sisters (apparently) has an affair with. The ailing sister speaks in feverish sick-speak which never really takes off. She does die, in the end, and following the dream she has in death, her remaining two living sisters (apparently) are pulled together in a confusing incestuous embrace. Because the visual language of the play is so poetic, as an audience I felt resistant to following the plot of the story at face-value. In fact I found the story rather uninteresting compared to the mode of story-telling, which is problematic, I think.

But considering this was a first sketch of a work, I was pleased to see a complex idea realized so successfully. Jill (from the one other play of hers I'd seen) has such a specific and strong sense of spectacle and artfulness -- if the heart could reach the heights that concept achieves, this piece would make for a great evening of theater.

Summer of love...

In SUMMER'04, Miriam, a German woman, mid to late 30's, is married to a loving badminton-playing scholar, and she is on vacation by the lake with her husband, her glum 15-year-old son, and his 12-year-old Lolita-like girlfriend Livia who thinks it's ok to have sex with lots of different people. One day, while her son and his girlfriend are at the lake, they encounter a 30-something German-American man (Bill), who, enchanted by Livia takes command of the sailboat, sends her son packing and spends the entire day out on the lake with the 12-year-old. Livia is clearly drawn to this man, and next day goes off to his house and doesn't come back? What to do?

Go to his house, fall in love with him and have a torrid affair with him of course.

What begins as a seemingly interesting representation of rational, mature German family behavior quickly disintegrates with the entrance of the American stranger, but it's really not that the newcomer possesses such mysterious powers, but that the veneer of maturity and rationality was completely flimsy and false to begin with. Miriam becomes obsessed with her extramarital affair with Bill, and when Bill tries to break it off because he is earnestly in love with Livia (the adolescent girl), Miriam swears to never allow him to see her again. An accident on the sailboat leaves Livia with a nasty bump on the head and by the time they reach shore, Livia is dead. Miriam leaves her husband for Bill, the scholar father takes his frustration out on his son -- the father-son duo both emasculated, impotent and pathetic.

What is this movie about, really? Not sure, it was kind of an absurd soap opera about two unlikely romances and the destruction of relationships by very selfish people. It's difficult to watch an outrageous human drama when you don't care much about the protagonists.

The honor of ritual suicide

Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 B/W film Harakiri (Seppuku) has a gorgeous new print -- it played last weekend at the IFC, but it will be back again at the Film Forum over Labor Day Weekend. Check it out -- a powerful for a humanist approach to life over the hypocrisy of the honor codes of the samurai. Tatsuya Nakadai, delivers an unforgettable performance and the narrative unfolds in a particularly satisfying (albeit at times langorous) way, culminating in an amazing swordfighting sequence.