Silence is underrated in modern cinema, but not by the great Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa. In his short horror film, “Chime,” which is infuriatingly difficult to see in America, people are brought to madness by a sound so delicate that it is felt more than heard, and Kurosawa has you leaning toward the screen trying to hear the source of evil. When violence erupts in this film, it’s staged almost dispassionately, with no impersonal thriller music to beef us up and detach us from what’s happening.
A reader once took me to task for calling a Kurosawa film “empathetic and pitiless,” which they saw as contradictory terms. No need for too many semantics, but I maintain that you can empathize with something intimately and yet take a stark measurement of its vulnerabilities. And if I am being contradictory, that contradiction is essential to the unmooring feelings that Kurosawa’s movies evoke.
Kurosawa’s new film “Cloud” finds him returning to online culture, which he mined to ferocious and haunting effect in “Pulse” nearly 25 years ago. That film pivoted on ghosts who invaded the world via the internet, turning people into depressed and vacant husks — a notion that doesn’t even scan as a metaphor anymore. In “Cloud,” the concern is online commerce, or junk that’s re-sold and packaged online.
From the film’s opening, the protagonist of “Cloud” already has the vacancy that seeped gradually into the characters of “Pulse.” It’s the 21st century after all, and phones and endless commerce and ads and drone jobs ensure that vacancy is merely part of the game. Disaffection is a fashion statement, as well as a malady that people seek to salve by buying more crap that only intensifies said malady. The film opens on Yoshii (Masaki Suda) dramatically underpaying on bogus therapy devices and re-selling them online for a massive profit. He trades on the desperation of dealers and the boredom of buyers.
Kurosawa does not maintain the preachy, hectoring tone that such subject matter invites, usually from American directors looking to win awards. Movies leery of capitalism that are unable to acknowledge its lure are bogus — locked in the classroom begging teacher for a good citizenship grade. By contrast, Kurosawa pulls us into Yoshii’s hunger for success. Few films are this in sync with the universal, grinding desperation to escape the prison of check-to-check living.
Again, our kinship is nurtured by silence. Kurosawa will linger on Yoshii as he watches the items sell one by one on his computer. Yoshii’s is an empty yet hypnotic way to live one’s life, and like most of us, Yoshii wants to beat capitalism by earning on its terms. Then, he kids himself into believing, he can live however he wishes.
“Cloud” has the smooth and supernatural precision of prior Kurosawa movies. Every shot and detail is intentional and this sort of control creates tension. You feel the makers’ confidence in the trap they are setting. The cramped apartment that Yoshii initially rents is an evocative blend of office and warehouse that establishes his money-and-commerce obsession on a subliminal level. When he rents a luxurious house out in the country, he sets about turning the place into another industrial-chic blend of factory and cubicle. It’s a subtle, damning joke on our inescapable natures, on how commercialist instincts take root in our blood.
Kurosawa’s ability to suggest soul sickness with interior design and neutral dialogue brings to mind late Cronenberg, while his muscular way with a camera suggests David Fincher.
Every setting in this film feels intensely arranged, and yet “Cloud” isn’t one of those stifling movies that are swallowed up by production design. A warehouse that serves as the setting of the film’s climax casually looks like the perfect warehouse for a thriller. It’s shadowy, with deep and stylish industrial colors — a weirdly poetic warehouse from a coffee table book that happens to be hosting slaughter.
Kurosawa holds you with commanding matter-of-factness, and his tense and teasing script keeps tossing in odd little surprises. Yoshii has a day job at first, working for a man who adores him and is eager to promote him to management. Yoshii admits to his superior that he doesn’t value the work and that he’s phoning it in, and the manager assures him that’s fine as long as he looks committed.
We look at the factory and intuit Yoshii’s boredom, as it’s another blend of cubicle and gadgets. Most of this movie appears to be set in an outpost of Amazon. Kurosawa’s ability to suggest soul sickness with interior design and neutral dialogue brings to mind late Cronenberg, while his muscular way with a camera suggests David Fincher.
Yoshii has a girlfriend, Akiko (Kotone Furukawa), who encourages and resents his ambitions. This is remarkable because we take Yoshii for the committed loner type, perhaps a descendent of cinematic loners like Gene Hackman in “The Conversation.” When he and Akiko move out of Tokyo into the country, he hires an assistant, Sano (Daiken Okudaira), who appears poignantly eager to please. There isn’t much work in the country, he says. As I sketch this movie in for you, it becomes more apparent to me how thoroughly Kurosawa has considered how money shapes relationships.
The first hour of “Cloud” conditions us to expect a smart upscale social thriller that will follow Yoshii as his cynical re-selling job comes back to haunt him, offering a comment on how all forms of media have deepened our obsession with money and disconnection from people. Kurosawa delivers that kind of film, but in a radically unexpected manner. The movie becomes surreal but maintains its intensely tactile, “realistic” tenor—a conflict in subject matter and style that is intentionally disorienting.
“Cloud” turns into a siege thriller, as Kurosawa gives the anger machine of the internet physical form, with shit-stirring replaced by violence. Sounds very conceptual, but Kurosawa’s action is as crisp and frighteningly clear as his industrial ennui. As in “Chime,” he’s elucidating the thin thread separating cultural noise from extravagant bloodletting. Once again, does this stuff even rate as metaphorical anymore? Pick up your newspaper; then see this sleek, poignant and supremely sick thriller.
Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer” is a rarity: a convincing movie about working class people that isn’t condescending or looking to score points. It is an intimate and precise story of a family in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and it is so hushed that I fear that people will take it for granted, assuming that “not much is happening.”
In short, pin-sharp scenes, MacLachlan sketches in the history of the family. Bill (David Strathairn) and Venida (Celia Weston) are a long-married couple who live with their son, David (Will Pullen), and his wife, Tammy (Jane Levy). It takes the movie a while to reveal even that information so straightforwardly, as MacLachlan allows connections to arise seemingly incidentally, over talk of coffee and what happened last night.
Patterns emerge. Bill is a veteran of the Vietnam War, while David served in Iraq. Bill has since established a sheet metal company, at which David now works. Whether we’re at the office or the V.F.W. or Bill and Venida’s house, MacLachlan shows a deep understanding of how people behave, how they talk around things of great import that they might not even consciously know to be hounding them.
As people drift in and out of this family’s orbit, including other family members, Tammy becomes the movie’s nucleus. It’s a difficult role to do well, the sort of role that Amy Adams once played in the MacLachlan-penned “Junebug,” a person who is so reliably sunny that people take her for a simpleton. That sunniness is not a sign of delusion, but of a struggle to take a disappointing life on its terms without submitting to hopelessness. That sunniness is an act of courage, then, and that’s exactly the subtext that Levy sustains in a deeply moving performance.
That sunniness is a light for Bill, who is close to Tammy. No, it’s not that kind of movie. Theirs is the relationship of “I wish you were my father; I wish you were my daughter.” As Dave succumbs to demons, Tammy’s presence in this house is imperiled, spurring Bill to try in his own quiet way to steer Dave on a better course. That’s the plot, and it doesn’t intrude on the film’s wistful melancholia.
Lest Bill appear too dear, too dependent on Strathairn’s unimpeachable credentials as a titan of 1980s and ’90s-era indie cinema, Venida keeps making pointed references to his own slips. Nothing is ever directly said, and yet we’re allowed to understand that Venida resents him for how their children are. In a movie brimming with great acting, Weston gives the best performance of her career, showing the kind of future that could await Tammy as well as any of us: one of contented resignation.
“Cloud” is now streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is rentable elsewhere. “A Little Prayer” is rentable online.
