Take One (Jul 1978)

Sr neler noon ge cp ee en oc en Max’s character is so strong and coherent that we feel his personality not only as something present but as the result of a history that stands behind the present moment. Hoffman actually manages to give us at least traces of a Azstory of personality. Straight Time depends partly on an alienation effect. Nothing on screen invites our participation; we are not swept away. What we do get, however, is the working out of patterns of recognition. We don’t get to know Max intimately, but we do get to recognize his patterns of action and the reasons behind those patterns. To reinforce the alienation effect, the script does not draw convenient lines between bad lawmen and oppressed outlaws. All the men in the film are hard, streaked with meanness, even FILM REVIEWS the addict Willy (Gary Busey). At one point Max’s parole officer busts him for suspected parole violation; the accusation is unjust and Max is released. To avenge the injustice Max attacks the parole officer while driving on a freeway. Max’s attack isn’t a clean revenge; it’s messy, improvised, and very brutal (and ends with public humiliation of the officer). However unlikeable the lawman may be, Max outdoes him in sheer ferocity and spite. Straight Time doesn’t rely on any textbook version of the system making it impossible for ex-cons to live a normal life. Incidentally, the film does reveal the: strict and often ludicrous parole stipulations that an ex-con must obey. But Max is not a victim of the system. He is the product of a series of choices, acting in conspiracy with circumstance, that have brought him to his present condition. The film is engaging because we can follow—intellectually and emotionally—this decision-making process. Hoffman lets us watch Max suffer through this process, but he doesn’t contaminate the character with sentimentality or false audience sympathy. It’s this, perhaps, which makes Hoffman’s performance so brilliant, and one that I think will be reviewed and studied for a long time to come. W.S. Di Piero W.S. Di Piero is a teacher, poet and freelance writer based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A GEISHA Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi A New Yorker Films release. Directed by Kent Mizoguchi. Screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda. Photography by Kazuo Miyagawa. Music by Ichiro Saito. In Japanese with English subtitles. Cast: Michiyo Kogure, Ayako Wakao, Seizaburo Kawazu, Chieko Nanwwa. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Gion-Bayashi (Gion Festival Music) is having its American premiere this year under the title A Geisha. Filmed in 1953 three years before his death during the final, richest petied of his 35-year career—after Ugetsu (1953) and before Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—A Geisha reveals Mizoguchi at the height of his creative power. It is quite simply a masterpiece of the highest order. A loose reworking of his Sisters of Gion (1936), A Gezsha contrasts Japan’s traditional conception of the geisha’s role in society with the changing values emerging in a post-war world. Eiko (Ayako Wakao), the daughter of a deceased geisha, comes to her mother’s best friend and co-worker Miyoharu (Michiyo Kogure), eager to train as a ‘‘maiko’’ in order to follow in her mother’s footsteps. In memory of the girl’s mother, Miyoharu takes Eiko under her wing, borrowing the money necessary to finance the girl’s training and introduce her to the best customers of Kyoto’s Gion District when she is ready to ‘‘debut.’’ It soon becomes clear, however, that Eiko represents that part of Japan beginning to question past values, rejecting those she finds unacceptable and demanding the right to exercise free will whenever she chooses. When the girl not only spurns a prospective patron, but violently rejects his advances by biting his face so badly that he is hospitalized, her mentor Miyoharu also begins to question the basic assumptions of the profession that has provided her means of livelihood. 8 Eiko violently rejects a prospective patron's advances by biting his face. A Geisha is one of Mizoguchi’s most corrosive indictments of a society that consigns its women to varying forms of humiliation and degradation. Even though it is set in 1953, the film makes explicit the continuing application of feudal concepts in a country still reeling from the devastating effects of World War II. Nowhere are these lingering vestiges more apparent than in the role the geisha is expected to maintain in this world of shifting values and accelerating modernization. At one point in the film the geisha is deemed one of Japan’s national treasures, comparable to the Noh, the tea ceremony and Mount Fuji. It is this increasingly tenuous tradition that the spirited, willful Eiko at first challenges, almost shatters, and then, tragically, accepts in order to survive. A Getsha’s credits unfold as the camera slowly pans left over Kyoto’s jumble of buildings and dwellings, the mountains rising beyond with an occasional glimpse of sky. At the end of the credits Mizoguchi cranes down to the city, irrevocably eliminating the small portion of sky with its intimations of hope and freedom. The first shot of the narrative is a low angle focusing on a nafrow street in the Gion District. Eiko, suitcase in hand, moves determinedly from the right foreground of the frame, her figure receding into depth of field as she searches for the house of her mother’s friend. The contrast of the high-angled pan over the credits with the subsequent low-angled fixed frame and its feeling of confinement, immediately establishes the film’s central tension between freedom and constraint. This tension is expressed through the relationship between Miyoharu and her protégée Eiko, who soon adopts the same