Sonatine/Blue Velvet

Tonite I had an interesting double-hitter: one film steeped in static, existential contemplation, the other a bizarre, horrifying melodrama. Kitano's Sonatine and Lynch's Blue Velvet.

Sonatine is a curio. Kitano's emphasis is on violence and nothing, excising exposition, hinting at a story rather than filling it with things like explanation and emotion. His films are about human bodies placed in time, and it is about the space which those bodies occupy. Sonatine is a difficult piece because given K.'s aversion to conventional narrative, this particularly convoluted yakuza tale jumps from place to place, character to character with nary a consideration for coherence. It usually takes a few viewings to understand (or at least retain) what happens in a K. film. (The poor Mrs. whom I made watch the film requested a thorough recap of the story, and she's the smart one.) One thing that sets Sonatine apart from the rest of K.'s films is its clear bisection of gangster-life, which, by the grace of classical cinematic extension, speaks for all men. Japanese men, specifically (K. is very much a maker of films for a J. audience), which is not to say that great art, which this could be, does not span cultural boundaries. Leather cushions and interchangeable, tight interiors clash with decaying wood and an eternity of beach, placing K. and his unruly band of thugs under-flourescents-then-a-cloudless-sky. Like a pomegranate, chopped in half, one gets yellow meat and bleeding red seeds--when a character is shot in the face, the blood pours into a little red pool in the yellow sand. As K., embedded in yellow, tossing to himself a red frisbee against a sky blue ocean, the film illustrates a chunk of man, cut into his constituents of turbulence and stillness (K.'s cinema is nothing if not the place and the moment where the ocean meets the sand). Inside, outside, day, night, asleep, awake, there you are, barrel in your temple, throwing a frisbee into the wind.

Blue Velvet I don't really like. The satire of picket-fence innocence is too successfully bland to be very interesting. Compare this to his evocation of wide-eyed Hollywood dreaming in Mulholland Drive, which was able to convey the same jokey innocence with a great deal of expression. In their scenes together, Dern and Maclachlan simply go through the Nancy-Drew-crushes-on-a-Hardy-Boy motions, Elmes photographing most of it in a banal, expository way (where K. is lacking, L. is practically diarrhetic). When the story bifurcates into a tale of nastiness and horror, there is nothing cohering it to the hokey artifice of small-town values save for a vague impression of sexual allegory (wherein M. is moving from sinful masturbatory fantasy into romantic fulfillment). This could've been overlooked had the film not had so many passages executed with a safe palette that quickly relieve the tension they create. When M. is taken for a joyride by Hopper, there's this shot where H. looks back at him, profanely threatening him, his eyes stony and crazed. L. has the mind to linger on this shot, rightfully, and it's frightful. The L. of Lost Highway, M.D., and even Eraserhead, would have been able to carry this nightmare through, but the way the rest of the scene is cut, with a prostitute dancing on a car to Roy Orbison and H.'s goons doing a bit of silly-looking knockabout shuffling, the dreaming ends and the yawning begins. I attribute this inability to handle the material to L.'s burgeoning commercial art. With Eraserhead, he didn't have to make compromises. It's still his best film. He then entered a period of trying to juggle his macabre sensibilities with a necessity to have his movie seen. Shortly after B.V., he did Twin Peaks which must've slowly taught him how to reconcile his extremeness with prime-time timidity. There are plenty of great moments throughout, but its tone and expressiveness (and aim) are too inconsistent.