1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 66: Microcosmos

“A documentary on insect life in meadows and ponds” (IMDb).

I’ll try to be brief. This is the rare masterpiece about which the less is said, the better.

First, what it isn’t: a documentary in David Attenborough’s vein. No attempt is made to explain why these creatures are designed as they are, why they behave as they do, or how they are connected to the ecosystem. This is no sociological treatise. It doesn’t exist to sway one’s opinions or to add to one’s store of knowledge.

Very few words are spoken. They are in French.

There is an English version, narrated by Kristin Scott Thomas:

A meadow in early morning, somewhere on Earth. Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, the stones are mountains, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean. Time passes differently here: an hour is like a day, a day is like a season, and the passing of a season is a lifetime. But to observe this world, we must fall silent now, and listen to its murmurs.

The creatures and their habitat remain alien, exotic. Perhaps the movie makes them more so. Dragonflies and bees, grasses and flowers and puddles, are so closely and brightly photographed that they look glossy and artificial, as if they were insect-mannequins perched upon display furniture. (By comparison, their synthetic counterparts in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids appear grittily realistic.) But if magnification makes real insects seem curiously more and less genuine, it also bestows personality on their movements. A viewer is tempted to ascribe human-like intentionity to these bugs – and, also, to the plants, which, in speeded-up sequences, curl themselves up or spread themselves out, or wrap themselves around hapless pollinators.

There is music: classical, new-age. There are idyllic panoramic shots. Surprisingly, it matters that the movie is French: I kept half-expecting to glimpse, at the bottom of the screen, that ant-like, Sisyphean pseudo-peasant, Jean de Florette, hauling building materials across a meadow. The lighting at close range is vivid, if not harsh; at a distance, it is softer, not so unlike the lighting and focus of those gorgeous, delicately pervy, tedious offerings of David Hamilton, that English confectioner of French nubile skin.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My reaction, the first time I viewed Microcosmos, was ho-hum. I’d been hoping for years to see it, ever since it was reviewed by Siskel & Ebert. One afternoon, the Cornell Cinema screened it for children. When I sat down, I noticed a fellow grad student ushering his large brood across the theater row in front of mine. The excited children settled in; the lights were dimmed; clouds appeared on the screen, landscapes came into view, and the first insect protagonists did their numbers. Soon, I was asleep. I slept through the rest of the movie (it isn’t long).

I revisited it last night with Samuel and Daniel, who, insect-like, climbed up and down the furniture and my person the whole while. Even so, they paid attention. Samuel is still talking about Microcosmos today. I, too, itch to see it again.

It’s a good movie to chill out to.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 46: Maborosi

Some dialog from Michael Cera’s Youth in Revolt:

I think my favorite film was Tokyo Story. I just think Mizoguchi is a great director.

But wasn’t that by Ozu?

Who can say?

I’m reminded of this joke because I, too, must talk about Ozu without having seen his movies.

Does that matter? I know enough about Ozu to understand that, visually and rhythmically (and also, probably, thematically), Maborosi has the style of an Ozu movie.

I didn’t get so strong a feeling when, a couple of years ago, I watched The Third Murder. That movie introduced me to Maborosi’s director, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Maborosi, more than The Third Murder, must be Ozu-like.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I doubt I’ll review a quieter movie than Maborosi – even if I decide to review Microcosmos (which, I dimly recall, is just footage of insects chewing leaves).

Stuff actually happens in Maborosi, but it barely seems to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

There’s a wonderful passage in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A man describes a brief but sublime experience involving a single beam of light at the bottom of a well. His life, ever since, has been shadow-like.

Like this unfortunate man, Yumiko, the protagonist of Maborosi, has largely stopped living.

In early scenes, she is gloriously happy with her young husband. Then he dies. It is a baffling death. It seems to be a death full of life, if such a thing can be; at the very least, he dies on his own terms.

The life that is snuffed out is Yumiko’s, even though she’s just twenty years old and has a beautiful infant son.

Yumiko remarries. She moves from Osaka to a remote seaside village. Her son and stepdaughter grow up happily together. Her new husband and inlaws are good people. Yumiko has good moments.

But she is not fully present in her life. The memory of the dead husband draws her away from her surroundings. Usually, this is not explicitly commented upon; but everything suggests it. Action is observed from a distance. The scenery is gloomy to look at; meanwhile, this or that person performs this or that movement in some remote corner of the screen. Foreground becomes background.

Life goes on, but only at the edge of Yumiko’s consciousness.

Meanwhile, this or that supporting character is lured toward death. Some characters die; most don’t. Yumiko can’t understand the attraction of death. That’s why she constantly grieves.

I am going to stop now because the New Year is almost here, and I am about to fall asleep; and besides, there is little more about Maborosi that I could discuss. The richness is in the detail with which daily life, or its negation, is observed.

P.S. Another movie Maborosi reminds me of: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar.