I haven’t posted my “Guide to Cinema” lately, but here are four new reviews that I will move to under their proper years before I post the next Trip Journal entry. My other item on substack is The Return of the Tower of Babel: Birth Pangs of the Aquarian World with chapters on Trumpism, QAnon, Cancel Culture, COVID-19, Chaos Magic, the January 6th Saturnalia, and Ukraine. Anyone who wants the whole document of either book without having to working through substack can write me for it with their email, and I will send as an attached file. I have also posted them on my website, www.richardgrossinger.com.
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Sea of Love, directed by Harold Becker (1989). To my mind Richard Price’s scripts (and novels) are uniformly brilliant, insightful, funny, culturally astute, and hip to the tiny daily nuances that most writers miss. This movie is a rewrite of a novel—not a screenplay but a use of some of the elements of Ladies Man (a book I haven’t read). Aside from the fact that Sea of Love is a tantalizing whodunit with an unexpected twist at the end, it is also a snapshot of 1989, a human and cultural landscape that is substantially gone. The story itself is heartbreaking and ugly. It involves three “serial” murders that a team of police led by Detective Hank Keller (Al Pacino) and his partner Detective Gruber (an unrecognizably young Richard Jenkins) try to solve. Of course everyone is 30+ years younger in Sea of Love, but Jenkins has the most startlingly different energy.
They are joined by Detective Sherman Toulhey of Queens (John Goodman) after they discover that each of their unsolved cases shares details.
In addition, Gruber is now married to Keller’s ex-wife, and he can’t let go of her, can’t even completely remember she’s not his wife anymore and, not only that, but she is married to his partner. The fist fight that finally breaks out between the two men is inevitable. Keller is also as much of a “light sleeper” as Willem Dafoe’s John LaTour in the movie of that name. Keller gets confused in the middle of the night and picks up the phone to call his no-longer “wife.” The situation wreaks with personal pain, and that pain drives the movie even more than the crimes.
But back to the serial murderer. Each male victim is found lying facing down on a bed. There are three clues: fingerprints left by the murderer, the fact that the victims all placed want ads looking for women for romance or one-night stands, and a lipstick-smeared cigarette indicating that a woman was present. In a skillful framing device, the first victim was discovered when the arm of his 1989 record-player kept returning the needle to beginning of the song “Sea of Love” until a neighbor was so driven crazy that she went to investigate. The name and simplistic lyrics of the song continue to frame, inform, and serenade the story, especially its title line: Come with me / To the sea / Of love. Not a lucky invitation in this movie.
The police all come to the conclusion that the killer is a woman who answers ads that have poetry in them and then murders her victims during or after sex. For her it is a sadomasochistic game. They decide to run their own ad using a love verse composed by Keller’s dad for his mother decades ago, and then (as planned) Keller and Toulhey meet each of the women who answer the ad to get her fingerprints from a wine glass. The setting of this trap covers a lot of the film and provides oddly slapstick humor in the context of noir.
Keller and Toulhey also go to visit a man who placed a poetry ad but is still alive. The appearance of police embarrasses him in front of his wife and children. He has to explain simultaneously to them that it’s nothing and, to the two detectives more privately, that he was just playing around and had no intention of following through with “sea of love” sex. They are dubious that he would have spent the money on the ad and the P.O. box, but he swears on the name of his wife and children (I think) that he was dropping it entirely. In the next shot his dead body is being removed by forensic police from a state like that of the original victim.
An opening subplot involves a different police trap—trying to get men on whom unanswered warrants have been issued come to a hall by inviting them to meet some of the New York Yankees. Those getting the letters they think that they have been randomly chosen, so they show up. This allows the police, Keller in particular, to be introduced to the movie’s viewers. In a good news/bad news announcement, the bad news turns out to be that the Yankees can’t make it. There is no good news. The even worse news is that they are all under arrest as police swarm in.
Outside the dragnet, though, Keller lets a latecomer off. The guy is rushing to bring his little boy to meet Dave Winfield. The police in the squad car check; there’s a warrant on him. Keller says, “Sorry, no Yankees.” Guys walks away with his kid. Keller is shown to be a good guy, a compassionate cop. This set of interactions loosely foreshadows the main plot in a story that is structured around its own verisimilitudes.
Each woman who comes to dine with either Keller or Touhey, one by one, is excluded by her fingerprints. Only Helen Kruger (Ellen Barkin) won’t handle the glass and leaves abruptly, raising suspicion that she’s the killer. Her explanation is that she knows at once she is not romantically interested in Keller, hence doesn’t even want to have a drink. But then she changes her mind and seems not only to want to go out with him, but to have fallen in love with the guy. I may be missing something, but I consider this detail a stretch, changing from no chemistry with Keller to explosive desire. It serves the function of heightening suspicion about her as the murderer and Keller as her next victim.
Now the facets of the plot have reached their point of no return. Keller doesn’t care any longer if she’s the murderer. He’s willing to be murdered by Helen if only to get to continue his passionate affair with her, each time convinced and afraid she will produce a gun after love-making. During this series of trysts, Keller must admit to Touhey what’s going on and at the same time conceal from him the extent of his obsession: he and their main suspect are in love, and he is sure to end up dead. That becomes even more likely after he sees the ads of the other three victims stuck on her refrigerator, but that sets in motion the film’s closing rush that I haven’t gotten to yet.
Barkin is remarkable in her expression of passion with Keller. She probably exceeds the parameters of her role and almost breaks the movie with her aggressive strip teases and throes of seduction during which Keller must behave simultaneously like a man driven to wild passion and a man about to be killed. Kroger is also a divorcee with a child and is courting Keller as a potential stepfather and co-parent. Basically, he is being offered a family life he never had and his death in the same package. He doesn’t know which, but he can’t forfeit his chance at happiness—and sleep.
Pacino doesn’t seem right for the role, especially during the sex scenes; he doesn’t quite match up with Barkin. He’s a bit too desperately trying not to seem desperate, while also exercising streaks of suspicion, searching her purse, throwing her against the wall. It’s a wonder she keeps returning, or it’s suspicious, but that’s the dialectic of the film: the lady or the tiger? Does she want to kill him or have sex with him? Is he her sweetheart or next victim? Is her attraction to him matrimonial or sado-carnivorous?
Pacino’s Keller doesn’t match her pitch or reify her own unexplained desperation with the right blend of empathy and mistrust; he’s too erratic for so much passion coming at him. Dafoe might have been better, or Christopher Walken, or Tom Berenger as police officer in Someone to Watch Over Me. However, Pacino is way better than the actor originally cast for the role: Dustin Hoffman. We don’t need demure “Mrs. Robinson” cajolery scenes.
Sea of Love is also about the difficulty of being a cop and a lover. In the shoe store where Helen works, Keller risks his identity to protect her from thug customers. One of them recognizes him as a cop, leading him to out himself while giving a signature Price soliloquy about the value of police as protectors of society, Pacino’s far and away finest moment.
When Kruger is outraged that her lover is a cop and didn’t tell her, it torques the plotline for the viewers playing detective. If they thought she wanted to make a cop her next victim as part of her kinky, outré sex game, they pretty much have to drop that or add further twists to Kruger’s character.
Price winds the lover-killer/lover-lover dichotomy as tight as it will go before letting it explode in a sequence of scenes in which Helen becomes definitely the killer (the names on her refrigerator) and then definitely not the killer while Keller struggles to make the right choice, for himself as a man and himself as a cop. Just as the dust seems to settle and Keller is baffled what is going on, and Helen has left without killing him, the plot takes its final twist. The killer appears, and Keller is in the established victim’s position. As Kruger’s love, he must kill or be killed by a very robust, crazed murderer.
I don’t want to give away the solution of crime, the identity of the killer, so I will give away the ending instead: Keller and Kruger do end up together just as both wanted, and to the relief of Keller’s ex-wife and husband. Within my review the killer is mentioned very indirectly, and he–yes, he—also has a legitimate reason to be in the building during one of the murders, thus to lead the cops briefly the wrong way (after a Hispanic deliver boy). He performs as Kruger’s alter ego, casting suspicion on her while seeming to avenge her for the sex that she in fact offered.
Summer Survivors, written and directed by Marija Kavtaradze (2018). Summer Survivors is not a great film except in one regard, its deep and subtle of portrayal of mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder by Paulius (Paulius Markevičius), one of two patients being transferred to a new clinic by an ambitious female doctor. Paulius BTW bears a striking resemblance to Latvian pro basketball player Kirstaps Porzingis.
The other patient, Juste played by Gelminė Glemžaitė, has a more hidden mental illness and plays an alternate sisterly and quasi-romantic role to Paulius’ manic outbursts and depressive crashes, as he alternately tries to override his conditions and all societal definitions of mental illness and gain his existential freedom and then cries for someone to help him. The doctor, Indré, played by Indré Patkauskaité, makes a third player, as the trio exchanges roles and definitions of doctor and patient, madness and sanity. They barely complete a successful road trip—it is a road-trip movie to Vilnius—and get the clinic van there. In fact, they tape over its medical lettering along the way in order to hide the nature of the occupants, from themselves as well as outsiders.
I am reviewing these films partly to call attention to alternatives to Netflix’s new overwrought, AI-era-driven, gimmick-laden artifices in lieu of artful films. Film Movement Plus offers slower, more thoughtful films, a series of mostly obscure foreign films, some from underrepresented countries. Not all of them are as interesting as Summer Survivors, but they are all at least real. I recommend Pushing Hands (Taiwan, directed by Ang Lee), a t’ai-chi-oriented film about aging and generational change, and They Say Nothing Stays the Same (Japan, directed by Odagiri), which bears a resemblance to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, only about a Meiji-era (late nineteenth-century) boatman on a river, Toichi (Akira Emoto), rather than a modern-day janitor for Tokyo Toilets. I found the Kosovo film Babai discouragingly perverse and ludicrously repetitive but probably a fair representation of the plight of many poor and displaced people in the world. The frustration, petty violence, and failed reconciliations become hard to watch, especially when carried out by a child trying to stay with his father when both are crossing borders illegally.
They Say That Nothing Stays the Same, directed by Joe Odigaro (2021). This film set in Meiji-era—late nineteenth-century—Japan is about a boatman on a small but turbulent river. Toichi (Akira Emoto), takes people back and forth to the village on the other side and has for his whole life, but a simple bridge is being built to replace him. He has grown old rowing and poling his boat, and he has suffered insults, regrets, and disrespect, but also praise, honor, and joy. Like the cab drivers in Taxicab Confessions, he has spied on many astonishing conversations and untoward events in process.
They Say Nothing Stays the Same is almost an incredible film—at moments it is—as ghosts, spirits, dreams, apparitions, splendidly exotic wraiths, mummers, moth women, spirit vampires, and souls departing and returning converge and overlap, each needing at some point to cross the film’s river in its boatsman’s boat.
Odagri has been criticized for painting canvasses more than scripting a movie, which has some validity. His “perfect days” are made of perfect shots of rain, wind, water, waves, light, fireflies, snow, and Alfred-Stieglitz-quality portraits as (apparently) just about every prominent Japanese actor of the time enters for at least a bit role.
Ririka Kawashima plays a spirit inhabiting the body of a young woman whom Toichi finds floating in the river and pulls out. The woman is dead and is meant to cross and then reincarnate, but Toichi has disrupted the process by rescuing her before she does. She does not belong in this world, being dead, but she comes to live with Toichi (she has nowhere else to go), and she shows her supernatural power by swimming underwater longer than any human could. She is also a banshee, a hungry ghost, a vampire, and a devouring demon. She seems gossamer and paltry, in need of Toichi’s protection, but her powers are supernatural, for she cannot be harmed—ghosts are not physically suspectable to human violence. Her dybbuk ferociously murders the men who try to rape her, leaving a gruesomely bloody scene in Toichi’s hut. Then she ends the movie by telekinetically setting it aflame with a hermeneutic fire.
Toichi also helps the son of a hunter take his father’s body across the river in the pouring night rain to leave for the animals to eat, to give something back for the lives he has taken.
In a sense, this is a surreal film about the relationship between the boatman over the Styx (Toichi) and the bar-do realm itself, the bridge between, which severs Toichi from his boatman job but catapults the village out of “perfect days” into noisy modernity.
Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, written by Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, starring Kōji Yakusho as Hirayama (2023). Wim Wenders has written and directed so many complex and varied films, most of them with conventional plots, even if (as in his angel films Wings of Desire and Faraway So Close), the conventions are metaphysical. Perfect Days is different. It captures the flow of time itself and the meaning of existence. It is Zen-like in style, a peephole into a life—a life ritual—being well lived.
That the hero, Hirayama, is a public bathroom cleaner for Tokyo Toilet makes clear that neither status nor financial reward makes a day or a life perfect. It is the act of experiencing the world in terms of its joys, beauties, wonder, and sorrows that creates a sustaining texture deeper than either happiness or comfort, while honoring them too. In keeping with this theme, Hirayama’s toilet is an upscale, colorful set of stalls in a wealthy ward across town from his own modest apartment.
Perfect Days is almost unreviewable, especially in temporal terms (as you will see) because everything is of equal importance and only loosely tied together. The movie covers seventeen days in Hirayama’s life and, in particular, his unorthodox interactions with various individuals who are relatively close to him. Because instead of a plot there are seventeen days in which events are hung on each other improvisationally, and people mostly take advantage of Hirayama’s generosity, good nature, and lack of material self-interest, it is difficult to give a plot summary or say exactly what happened. The events don’t make ordinary, logical sense. The film’s lack of a plot means that its true aesthetic and value are the quality of time and the creation of perfect—meaning imperfect—days.
Apparently, the film was shot in seventeen days to match cinematic and story time frames to each other. In other words, you have to experience it; there is no way to grasp its sense from a review.
Hirayama’s assistant at Tokyo Toilet, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), is central to his workdays there. Takashi’s girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada) holds a number of subplots together. She is actually just a woman with a blonde-dyed Western look whom Takashi follows from the toilet and asks out. But his motorbike won’t work, so he asks to use Hirayama’s van. Hirayama then drives them to the playing of a Patti Smith cassette (for “cassettes,” see below). Takashi is also broke, so he wants Hirayama to get the cassettes appraised. When the three go to a specialty shop, the old analog reels turn out to be worth hundreds of dollars. Takashi wants them sold at once so that he can have money to take Aya out and hopefully even stay with her. Hirayama grabs them back from him but loans Takashi almost all the money from his wallet. Meanwhile Aya steals a Patti Smith cassette that she will later return to Hirayama with a kiss on the cheek. Takashi will not only never repay the debt, but he will quit without warning around day sixteen, leaving Hirayama to work all his stalls as well as his own until Tokyo Toilet can assign a replacement.
Other characters include Hirayama’s niece Niko (Arisa Nakano); her mother, Hirayama’s wealthy estranged sister who is driven in a chauffeured car in contrast to her brother’s lifestyle; people in the restaurant and laundry Hirayama regularly visits; and his various “customers,” one of whom he plays tic-tac-toe with by sliding a piece a paper through a slot between stalls.
Nonhuman “characters” incldes Hirayama’s cassette player and cassettes from mostly the 1970s and 1980s, his old-fashioned camera, trees has befriended and takes pictures of, his books [including William Faulkner’s Wild Palms (with the elegiac line “... between grief and nothing I will take grief.”); Patricia Highsmith’s short stores, and essays of Japanese author Aya Kōda)], one of which he reads every night before going to sleep on a mat, and his dreams (seventeen day-ending dreams, see below).
A bit past the midway point niece Niko runs away from home, or at least decides to hide from her mother at Hirayama’s place. She likes it better there than home for a time. She reads (and later borrows) a book and, like Takashi, is fascinated with the cassettes in Hirayama’s car, which he plays every day. When she wonders if she can hear them on Spotify, Hirayama thinks she is referring to a store.
Hirayama’s camera shoots in black-and-white on film that must be developed and printed—he comes to get his pictures when they are ready. He dreams in black-and-white. His dreams may have a cinematic origin in Alfred Hitchcock’s characters’ dreams, but they are so much more complex with images, memories, and people flowing through complex layers representing the way they do in actual dreams.
Perfect Days celebrates the life texture that has been lost in the last forty or fifty years. The songs on the cassettes make a soundtrack of the era consonant with the technology of the player. Wenders and Takasaki are careful to pick music that expresses moods and landscapes that have been lost: The Animals – ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ (which also gets sung in Japanese by Maki Asakawa who provides the singing voice for the female proprietor of Hirayama’s favorite restaurant, The Velvet Underground – ‘Pale Blue Eyes’, Otis Redding – ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’, Patti Smith – ‘Redondo Beach’, The Rolling Stones – ‘(Walkin’ Thru The) Sleepy City’, Lou Reed – ‘Perfect Day’, The Kinks – ‘Sunny Afternoon’, Van Morrison – ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, Nina Simone – ‘Feeling Good’, and Patrick Wilson – ‘Perfect Day’.
In keeping with my atemporal filmography, Perfect Days closes at night with Hirayama and the female restauranteur’s fatally ill spouse playing “shadow hopscotch” by the water, a game I don’t understand in which they dance and skip over each other’s shadows while laughing, a game also out of keeping with the somber mood of the moment, but that sort of joy is what makes a perfect day. Until I read a version of the “plot” online, I drew the wrong conclusion that the fatally ill man was Hirayama’s former brother-in-law and that the woman he wanted Hirayama to take care of was his niece Niko rather than the man’s wife. Errors like this don’t mar “perfect days”; they are what make the film an accurate through-a-glass-darkly view of something that transcends its own premise.
If this entire universe in all its starry vastness and meta-material planes and dimensions is a thoughtform generated collaboratively by its animal, vegetable, human, angel, Buddha, and Bodhisattva beings, then time and space are no obstacle—they don’t exist—and perfect days are created by spirit.