Beauty and Sadness (Page 2)

But how can life possibly be lived once random murder has come so close and with such mad indiscretion? How can life be lived as a form of death? Having survived their ordeal, our characters become personae non grata, treated the way terminal cancer patients are often treated--like they're not quite there, or are stubbornly, inconveniently delaying the inevitable. Makoto, Kozue and Naoki (played by actress Aoi's real brother, Masaru) have their distinct postbus experiences: Makoto leaves home to wander, is eventually divorced by his wife and treated as an embarrassment by his family. The kids' mother abandons their unhappy household, their father subsequently dies in a car crash (we're pretty sure it's suicide), and the two wind up living alone, unspeaking, in their squalid house. But common pain proves a common bond: Only when Makoto seeks them out and they set up housekeeping--sleeping in the shape of a torii (if we're not reading too much into it), with the kids parallel to each other and Makoto serving as the bridge--does their dream state start to lift.

Aoyama alludes to François Truffaut's 400 Blows, employs Western music to make certain sometimes cloying points and eventually winds up adapting the road movie to his metaphysical survivors' tale. Despite the Ozu-inspired angles and distance of his film, his taste for sentiment is hardly an un-Western inspiration. But he's certainly indicting Japanese culture. Had this been a Western film, the Holocaust would likely have been an unavoidable issue (how differently its survivors are treated, for instance, and why). Grief counselors would have stopped the kids' story in its tracks. Tom Cruise would have been the lawyer fighting their damage suit against the bus company.

Instead, the culture of Eureka explodes the idea of Japanese family into something as twisted as Busjack Man's psyche. Kozue listens silently on the phone as her auntie says how much she has meant to visit, how much she really wanted her and her brother to live with her...and is the insurance money still coming in? The prodigal Makoto tells his family he's OK. "He said he's OK," his brother says, "now leave him alone." Naoki, the most damaged and silent and unapproachable, exhibits strange reactions to everything, including the extended visit of his cousin Akihiko (Saitoh Yohichiroh), a wack-job college student who is probably a family plant, but who provides much of the movie's much-needed humor. The secretary at the construction firm where Makoto works (his redemption is incremental; he rides a bicycle before he boards another bus) reveals that she too lost her parents as a child and was put into an orphanage by relatives who stole her insurance money. Makoto develops a mysterious cough.

Eureka is the most novelistic film to hit these shores since...well, at risk of revealing some kind of pro-Asian prejudice, Edward Yang's Yi Yi, another film with a seriously unhurried approach to construction. One of the most intriguing and seductive things about Aoyama's film, as was the case with Yi Yi, is how we're never so captivated by the obvious as we are by the painfully subtle. The serial killings that follow our quartet around (our suspicions flow like tides between the characters) seem almost incidental next to their inner lives. Likewise the pursuit of Makoto by the police inspector (Matsushige Yutaka) who killed Busjack Man, and who clearly wants to achieve absolution for the slaughter by proving Makoto's gone bad. "Your eyes were the same as the killer's," he tells Makoto. All we can remember is Makoto dissolving in shame and nerves.

No, the moments of Eureka that wring out your brain are more delicately devastating. Kozue--the movie's principal character when all is said and done, its conscience, its emotional bridge-builder, its selfless repository of pain--crosses a railroad track with her bicycle, stopping to consider the oncoming train, staring full-faced into the camera as if to ask our approval for whatever she does. Then, in an insidious bit of Joycean coincidence, unknowable by anyone but us, Makoto gets off that train. Krzysztof Kieslowski used to devise moments of such tantalizing realism of possibility, although they were usually a little less terrible than this particular moment of Eureka.

Aoyama's movie played at Cannes last year--one screening, no doubt because of its inconvenient length. It then played at the New York Film Festival. (For purposes of full disclosure, be advised that this writer was on the festival's selection committee.) It now opens courtesy of the invaluable Shooting Gallery Film Series, which has already made it possible for New Yorkers to see Marziyeh Meshkini's The Day I Became a Woman, among other otherwise unreleased films. And there's more good news: Aoyama returns to Cannes this year with a new film called Desert Moon. On the promise of Eureka, Aoyama makes it a very attractive prospect to head for the sunny French Riviera, to sit in the dark.

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