Customer Reviews

Japon - Director's Unrated Edition

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The movie is somewhat disturbing, very raw, very artistic.

A weary man (with a love of art) from the city goes to the country seeking serenity, and then to end his life. He observes country folk, adults and children, and is initially pretty numb to it all. Over time he seems to soften and cannot bring himself to commit suicide. He observes some of the simplest animalistic and human instincts. Taking a couple of chances to experience a bit more before he ends his life shows him how his actions may have affected others. Be warned, there is some sexual footage in this film that is not for the squeemish!

This movie is original, powerful, and unconventional. A nameless man, an artist, comes to a remote, primitive Mexican mountain village to seek solitude and to commit suicide. He finds lodging in the barn of Ascen, a kind, generous, non-judgemental woman in her 80s. Whe Ascen's criminal gang of relatives threaten to destroy her barn for the cement blocks with which it is made, the man begins to regain a raison d'etre. The relationship between the man and Ascen is complex. Trust and love build between the two, primarily, due to Ascen's quiet, unswerving kindness and concern for the man. She shelters and feeds him, and he attempts to challenge the relatives who wish to destroy her barn. Ascen tells the man that losing her barn is not a problem for her; her relatives need the blocks more than she does. She has an uncanny sense of separating what is truly important from material issues.

The movie should not be explained further. It is for the audience to savor. There are scenes in this film which I have never seen performed so explicitly. The last scene cannot be shaken from my memory. The pace of this movie is often painfully slow, and dialog is sparse. The harshnes and glare of the land is emphasized in the overexpoed look of the film. You can feel the heat, desolation and hopelessness of the landscape. Yet Ascen's unquestioning kindness and charity prevail amidst drunkenness, poverty and the outrageous theft of her property. What is important is kindness, charity and love. I loved the structural simplicity of this film, and the ontrasting ccomplexities of the relationship between Ascen and the artist. When the movie ends, one has the feeling of having moved further toward understanding the nature of love

This is a remarkable first film by a new director. WOW!!!

A handsome middle age arthritic painter travels to a remote
part of Mexico to commit suicide.
He seeks refuge from a lonely lady in her mid eighties who
is being cheated out of her home by relatives where the
painter is staying.
The painter and the old lady become close and sex follows,
difficult for the camera and the actors and viewers of this film.
(I assume)
No American film could ever film this and if they could,it
would not be with this realism.

I should like this film, but I don't. It has a lot of qualities I admire in films. Long takes, ambiguity, excellent, widescreen photography, yet, I can't help but think that the director read a book on "how to make an art film", which listed the above techniques, and then made this film (and threw in 2 horses screwing and a man making love to an 80 year old woman). I found this almost a hodgepodge of art house cliches. This film doesn't seemed to have evolved organically or naturally, like the films it emulates (like the work of Tarkovsky, which this film has been compared to). It feels like a carbon copy of an art film. Like I had said in a previous review of Bruno Dumont's 29 Palms and Gus Van Sant's Gerry, there seems to be a lot of posers out today making "slow, ambiguous" films in an attempt to be arty. They try to emulate the masters (like Tarr, Tarkovsky, and Jodorowsky), but they miss the point. Art is a mysterious process, coming out when you least expect it. There's no formula. I think it says more about our culture when a filmmaker makes a film like this with all the "art film" elements there, there's a tendency to rush out and automatically declare it a masterpiece. This is misguided and foolish thinking. A work of art must connect on a much deeper level. Just because it resembles a work of art doesn't make it one. This film is not completely worthless, as there is some good camerawork and the setting is beautiful, but I found the whole exercise superficial and shallow.

Another great Tartan Video release with a terrific in-depth interview with the film's director, Japon (Spanish for "Japan") is a resonant film whose title, says director Carlos Reygadas, is meant to symbolize the rising sun--i.e., the renewal of life.

Most of the characters in the film are non-professional actors and this is certainly true of the two leads, a late 50s-year old artist who says he wants to commit suicide, and the 80s woman he eventually stays with, in a completely isolated mountain village in Mexico.

As is true for the best Westerns, the land is a major character here and Reygadas manages, with his keen and skillful eye, to fuse the broad vista of what could be called a "soft" mountainous terrain with a growing sense of innocence on the part of the painter who, coming from a city (likely Mexico City), begins to feel the effects of a rural life in how he sees things, thinks about things, understand things.

The culminating scene of a sexual encounter is a powerful one--startling, completely unexpected, and all the more emphatic of the film's theme, as stated by the director, on the basis of that very intensity.

Sometimes what you think you want is not what you actually do--because it is not what you really want. Sometimes you discover that what you thought you wanted was less than what life means to you. And so you then do what life really means you to do--your life. It's your choice.

Japon succeeds brilliantly because its simplicity--which is no doubt what the director was striving for--penetrates our thinking hearts, our feeling minds. A man, a much older woman, the land.

See it.

The cinematography of "Japon" conveys the vastness and solitude in rural landscapes, and it does so with a poetic sensibility, which is also disquieting. Not rushing the lens through a picturesque scene leaves ample opportunity for this to happen. The human landscape of "Japon" does not fare as well, thus vindicating the title in ways the director perhaps did not forsee. The inhabitants of the little mountain village where the protagonist --city artist/intellectual --goes to execute a morose and improbably grandiose suicide plan-- are exoticized and debased beyond what is credible or endurable. They appear as drunkards, crooks, illiterate, pliable sexual partners, as props in some overlord's design. This is a view from afar and outside, and one steeped in condescention, if not abuse. It is a colonial's view of Mexico, offered by a young Mexican director. In his "featurette" rambling comments the director, Carlos Reygadas, further confirms this impression of detachment, distance and arrogance. Moreover, the ending is not instructive, nor comes as a good poetic solution to a plot which lies more outside the frame of the camera than evident on the screen. The old peasant woman gives her body to the artist, then her life? Why is this so? How could one have dreamt up a more subservient and quiet "native", and a more unsufferable urban dandy?

I know this is supposed to be an art film. The scenery is beautiful, but also depressing. Lots of poverty. I know these people live simply, and do not have a grocery store to go get meat, eggs, etc., but I could not stand the animal killings: the bird and the screaming of the pig (horrible!). A man also seemed to be cutting off the airway of a puppy, just to make him make noise (to sound like singing), which I was sickened by. Live way out in the country, not much to do, I guess.

I understand what the movie was trying to say, but I just did not like it very much. At times, it dragged on...camera panning for 5 minutes or more. I just did not find it that interesting. I was bored a lot of the time, and some things did not seem to have much of a point. The sex scene was strange, more like an instruction with him as the instructor, saying, "do this, no, not like that, move here, further over, now turn, now face this way, face down, face up (and all this time, nothing is happening)! The way he approaches her too is just, "O.K., I would like to have sex with you". She says, "you mean, you want to fornicate?". He says "yes", she says, "alright, but I would rather do it tomorrow", and he says"that's fine". What is that? They also never tell you anything about the man's background, and why he is so disillusioned with his life, why he wants to kill himself, etc. I did not really care that much if he did or not, because I did not feel like I really knew him, or sympathized with him or anything.

I like artistic movies just as much as the next (artist) person, but I would like them to be interesting and to have a little more of a point to them; maybe a little more depth of character. I don't know, maybe it's just me!

Many things went wrong with this attempt to produce a movie-classic for students of the arts. Failures include; the wide angle shots are blurry, panning was to fast, camera "taped" to moving vehicles bounced and osculated creating further distractions. There was NO SOUND (home movie quality) and VERY LONG periods of no captions to aid in figuring out what was said or going on(choice was ENGLISH or press 2 for SPANISH). I never did guess why he chose this remote village and his trip there was recorded in too large of jumps. TOTAL WASTE OF TIME.

I gotta say that this is a true piece of art! In every sense!
If you're looking for dumb simplicity then I'd suggest for you to view other more mainstream films because this one won't offer that. What you will get in this film is maturity and intelligence. As arrogant as it may sound it is the truth. There are no simple answers to life. And sometimes you'll get answers that have nothing to do with your questions. That is what this film explores. It's worthwhile if you got the time and patience.

One night not too long ago while suffering from insomnia and indigestion I turned on the tee vee and caught this flick. The fact that it was showing on cable past midnight should have been a fair warning. In a nutshell, this is about a suicidal, scraggy looking dude with a limp who goes to some godforsaken village and buggers an old shriveled-up hag. For good measure, we get to see horse on horse porn and lots of gratuitous violence involving incredibly stupid and ugly looking people. Enjoy!