Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002)

Irréversible is pretty wretched for about half its running time, but it's amazing how much it can turn itself around in the second half with some good ol' non-sensationalism.

It wasn't the surely motion sickness-inspired, whirly-gig camera - used to survey the lurid and seedy environment of the film's beginning (then returning later for a chaotic set piece taking place inside a gay S&M club; Salon's Andrew O'Hehir probably described this novel camerawork best with the thoroughly underused term "vomitous") - that pushes this film into the territory of excessiveness. Nor is it the film's gliding omniscient camera that flies over rooftops, uniting action and transitions, and in the end spins wildly above a representation of the irretrievably lost. It is not the visual ostentation itself that makes me accuse the film of sensationalism, although it is a contribution.

I actually appreciated the visual innovation and experimentalism of its gyrating eye and surely very technically-sophisticated, roboticized camerawork. It's bold, daring, and it works. It very nicely serves the film's suggestion that, perhaps, so mechanical are the forces that, without our heeding, gravitate us to the locations and events we find ourselves gravitated towards, this gravitation in turn dictated by the actions we find ourselves performing, which points straight back to that most fundamental force, or "mechanism," of all: our very biology, and the basic human urges that control us. This film's objective is to conflate and synchronize these forces that so fatefully find us going to a sexy coking dance party, walking home alone in a disreputable part of town, chasing down prostitutes, in a gay leather club, and, so often, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. These are the forces of time and biology.

Introducing the film's inverted order, the film opens with the entire end credits floating in and out of the frame, as if afloat in a slow current, its use of white and red text and the curve of its trajectory suggesting flowing blood cells, or chemical flotsam suspended in plasmatic fluid, riding the curve of the vein. The lull of the soundtrack's as-of-yet quietness, meanwhile, enhances our sense of the slow passage of time - the film already enmeshing its two motifs of inexorable time and exorable biology. Following this, the leading credits are then also presented: the pulsating, adrenaline rush score finally pounds in as the actors, producers, primary crew, and director Gaspar Noé's last names are flashed across the screen in all capitals, like "NUDE" on a neon sign. With this sensationalistic opening credits sequence, Noé is signaling the fact that he knows full well - and means to expose with this film - that all it takes to get a rise out of someone can be as simple and terribly effective as capitalized SEX flashing across your eyes and firing your synapses.

The film begins with atmospheric use of the vomit camera to visually abstract the film's opening environment of neon and lamp lit alleyways. We then go to a short prologue scene between two anonymous men exchanging words in an apartment room above the already-mentioned gay leather club, very generously called The Rectum. Noé shoots this scene in voyeuristic close-up, which, along with the natural lighting and the zoomed-in motion camera, introduce the film's desire to achieve a sense of verité aesthetics and gritty realism. This scene transitions with an aerial shot moving away from this room to the direct exterior, where we see the film's two main characters being escorted out of the club below.

After such a striking opening sequence, though, it is disappointing that the film proceeds to spend a brinkless first act playing out like an over-the-top episode of Cops, taking on entirely lax verité stylings as we follow Vincent Cassel roaming the seedier side of Paris like a mad dog. There is very little to truly note in this whole first third of the film, except that it only enhances the film's one-note sensationalism. The film's bid for naturalism clashes oddly with the Jerry Springer antics and shouting matches that make up much of the opening quarter's inappropriately high-octane and over-the-top vendetta-driven prowl through Red Light districts.

Life as it is, caught on film, is one of the film's foremost goals. But naturalism and novelty do not mix very well, and I cannot help but get an unmistakable whiff of novelty and literal "show-stopping" from this film's two oft-talked about instances of graphic violence. The film's two infamous scenes consist of the sudden placing of the camera in a completely static position, in order to film with unflinching steadiness graphic murder and rape. But when I was sitting watching these scenes, trying to decide whether to turn away or not, I did not feel as if they were showing to me an unflinching look at reality, but almost the opposite: I felt as if I was being fed a scene of contrived, exploitative theatricality.

Forcing the viewer to psychically inhabit such abuse and horror is certainly audacious. I do understand this point in enunciation he is trying to make, and I give him all the credit of compassion and empathy in the rape scene, not to mention critique. [This (and Breillat's Fat Girl for a second example) is the type of film that should be shown to the unsuspecting sex ed class (for the simple moral kick).] Further, the scene offers the utmost clinical presentation of the indignity of rape, considering it is daring us to note every violent thrust and dry flap of this unwanted act of anal violation.

But even then, the scene is really more suited for the philistine than the artist: it is a brute way to express the cruelty and ugliness of rape. It's a point expressed that would be more useful shown as courtroom evidence, or in a corrective facility, than in an arthouse. I do not want to say the scene is meaningless. I would personally feel out of line telling Noé, whose film is made with such vision, that the artistic decision he made here disqualifies a work of such vision. I take less discretion labeling it misguidedly ostentatious and flat-footed, mired in disregard as much as it is in moral discourse.

And so, thank god the 2nd half has Noé stumbling upon how I feel verisimilitude in cinema is really meant to work: as the displaced eye of the viewer - a viewer presumably not an unflinching robot, nor, hopefully anyway, an unflinching sadist who wants to take in graphic violence and rape the same way a surveillance camera takes in a convenience store robbery.

The displaced eye - that is, the verité camera - is much more naturally predisposed to take in and fascinate itself with human interaction and the movement of humans in space, not sitting put for whatever reason, which most definitely includes watching Noé take body horror to a blockheaded, barbarous extreme. Thus, the verité camera as applied to the casual events of the 2nd half is much more thematically justified and of much more proper affectation. The 2nd half - consisting of an integral, discursively pointed subway scene, a carefully choreographed party scene that portrays wanton sexual gratification very strikingly without resorting to exhibitionist crudity (albeit taking place before the rape scene in the chronology of the movie), and the poignant and truly naturalistic nude bedroom scene between Cassel and Bellucci (then real-life husband and wife) - infuses into the film the meaningfulness it was previously sorely lacking, and retroactively comments and enriches what we are forced to sit through in the first half.

This newly wrought meaningfulness thankfully doesn't fortress homophobia allegations lobbied at the film (largely in reaction to the sensationalistic first half and its depiction of a gay subculture), and it offers much more than merely emphasizing its narrative lynch pin of purity-turned-perversity at the turn of a screw, or even the film's most prominent and focused-on subtext involving the movie's mindbending, anti-chronological meditation on temporal vortex and tragically lost catharsis.

The film clicks during the train scene, where we finally figure out the dynamic between the three friends: Cassel is the simple primitive man, not at all a bad guy, but dictated by basic masculine drives instead of any higher thought; Albert Dupontel is the evolved and vaguely inadequate modern intellectual man; and Bellucci, as the woman.

The film is about sex - or at least sex as a primitive urge that is naturally inseparable from violence. "There are no bad deeds," the anonymous man says in the beginning (to the beguiling presence of notorious French actor Philippe Nahon), because everyone is guilty of pursuing those urges towards biological self-gratification, without exception, and in so, so many different ways.

Through its allusions to or depictions of sodomy, incest, racial dominance, intellectual superiority, and the thin lines between sex and rape, its spectrum of sexual gratification and the violence borne from it presents gratification as something that crosses boundaries from sexual to physical to purely psychological, as when Cassel's character takes his anger out on a Chinese taxi driver he intimidates and slings racial epithets at. The designated "person gratified," and the respective "gratifier," is made to criss-cross as often as the designated "victims" and "victimizers," the most prominent example being the intellectual Dupontel's succumbing to the urges of brutal physical domination in the story's wrap.

To address the charges of anti-homosexuality, the film really cannot be said to be making any generalizations about homosexuality, for it only purports to show us a narrow and enclosed presentation of a particular spectrum of hedonistic and primal lifestyles (both homosexual and heterosexual). The film's portrayal of homosexual sodomy as the debase epicenter of victimization fetishization is what has mainly garnered the film its accusations of homophobia, but it exists only as another of many segments of sexual society, a proliferation that Noe is generally surmising he has little place to persecute due to the philosophy his anonymous character in the opening scene espouses. Also, the film's peripheral utilization of a transgender person as narrative device, whom we see Cassel bully and demean, comfortingly exists only as a representation of a victim.

In conclusion, as a film about the unpredictability of hormonal compulsions (whether manifested in sexual acts or violent acts), one can say that, in retrospect, the film's most resonant and haunting moment is not the cinematically bludgeoning (pun most certainly not intended) horror of its rape scene or murder scene. It is when Monica Bellucci says something to this effect in response to Dupontel's insistence on excavating particular truths about her sexual behavior: You can't learn about sex from asking around, gathering data, and analyzing it. A person just has got to get out there - presumably "feel" something, in their blood, their biology, their loins - and experience it.

Little does she foretell her fate and grasp that this includes the most appalling and horrible of "feelings" and "somethings," ones that encourage the cruelty of dominance, rape, and non-mutual gratification.

Irréversible - 6/10

About That Film INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS...

So with Quentin Tarantino's new movie premiering right now, as I type, to the piranhas out at Cannes, I feel it's time for  a bit of a public announcement regarding this hotly anticipated film...

ABOUT THAT FILM "INGLORIOUS BASTERDS" (NOT A TYPOS)

We need to be expecting a lot from Inglourious Basterds.  

And no, I'm not saying we should expect a lot because we are going to get a lot. I'm saying we need to expect something in this film because "it" is a something we very well might not get, and we must acknowledge the step back - if it ultimately is a step back - for Tarantino. Because of my high esteem for Tarantino's last picture, Death Proof, I feel we need to raise our expectations higher than ever before for Inglourious Basterds, in terms of the level of thematic and subtextual elements it has to offer us... and thus be ready to call the film out if it falls short of achieving genuine relevancy, and creating truly meaningful statements about the real world - something that Tarantino has often been criticized for not doing, opting instead for the hermetically sealed artifice of his alleged "pop art" or "pulp cinema" inclination.

There is truth to this criticism.  I believe Death Proof, though, was a considerable step in the right direction, especially after the geeksploitation piffles that were the Kill Bill films, as good as they could often be.  Death Proof is his most rhetorically insinuating, hawk-eyed, and socially critical genre homage yet. This is because it breaches the parameters of mere homage and riffing, and finally makes the leap into more closely discriminating genre deconstruction, as he was more wont to do in the 1990s. 

Even Tarantino's iconic 1990s output somewhat pale in comparison to the edge he reveals in Death Proof.  Those early films indulged his tendency for sparkling homage to genre and incessant hagiography of his characters and their respective, idealized archetype. This less evaluative approach tended to defang his pictures of any trace of critical faculty. Attempted genre deconstruction strikes a viewer merely as flattering imitation.  While Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown have the credit of their revisionism and some choice subtext, we also get the sense Tarantino is too in love with the sensibilities, narrative elements, and aesthetic styles he draws from for these films.  This lack of a distanced eye really prevents him from zeroing in on the functionalism in genre representations, as is so inherently the subject under scrutiny in his films, which are, without exception, reflexive works revealing realities and nuances in film worlds.  Tarantino certainly shows true invention within his virtuoso filmmaking, but he is consistently criticized for his proclivity to "borrow" styles and aesthetics.  This is a tricky and often reactionary criticism, but it underscores the seeming "essential lack" that is consistently perceived by his viewers - a lack of true social and real-world commentary in his films.  There is certainly pathos and gravitas, emotionalism and dramatic parallels, etc. in his films, but while Jackie Brown is an affecting look at the business of living a life, and Pulp Fiction a dismantling look at the absurdities and romances of criminal codes, neither really dig deep or excoriate.  Both are blithe commentaries instead of incisive ones.  They brush upon things only to sink back into the amiability of the story and the story's sentimental value to Tarantino.

In Death Proof, I believe he finally goes the step further and chooses to reveal dysfunction and ugliness in the representations he appropriates, doing this by making us thrill at what are actually truly off-putting illustrations of brutal murder and remorseless victimization. The text seems to revel in the typical formula of the slasher film, the revenge film, the badass babe flick, but instead he imposes on this spare formula the spare structure of an Apichatpong Weerasathakul film and dares us to seek entertainment in what is essentially a thoughtless skeletal formula (slasher films and revenge films = exploitation at their purest), constructed only to make us cheer on violent death and, in the end, ugly retaliation on a helplessly injured and out-numbered old man.  The film's rich and painterly compositions, the story's allegorical simplicity, and the aforementioned structural build give this film the self-containment of a poem, and sets itself apart from Tarantino's other films in its lack of oh-so-clever plot machinations that often come as requisites to the cinema of escapism and pulp diversion.

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino is simply asking for this heightened critical eye. We're getting subject matter from him different from anything we have ever gotten before: a historical piece and a war piece dealing with the most harmfully systematic Fascist rule recorded in history.

Tarantino, in the past, has mined depth in the purely personal and emotional, but rarely-to-never has he ventured into the territory of the political or the grand social arena.  But now - with such subject matter as we have in this particular Quentin Tarantino movie - then incisive social and historical commentary is, pretty necessarily, what we need to be looking for, if we want this to be anything worthwhile in light of what Tarantino achieved with Death Proof.  He needs to prove he can illuminate critically on history as resonantly and astutely as he did on the correlative between vulnerability, power, and genre thrills in the work prior.  

And, considering my lack of enthusiasm for him before the existence of Death Proof, what I personally need from this film is just proof that he can illuminate in profound ways again... that he has continued to grow since Death Proof; that making that film further cemented in him a belief in the value of the most deliberative of allegory and the sharpest of critique.

Check out that colorful and stylish map they've got going on there. Does the Third Reich's have some Art Noveau-adherent cartographers under their commission, or will Tarantino make a point about the garish ideological branding that characterized Hitler's regime?

"Ridiculous" and "cartoonish" are not necessarily bad, and word is the film is both these things, but will it be at the service of nuanced historical considerations or simplistic Nazi-comeuppance fantasy?  I am cautiously optimistic, for while Tarantino's films may not all reach the heights of meaning, none of them can be called outright juvenility.

ANTI-CHRIST AT CANNES

Lars Von Trier's new film Anti-Christ premiered in Cannes this past Sunday, and apparently it's a mood-conceived provocation consisting of elements of explicit sexuality and extreme acts of violence.  One comparison levied at the film is "Bergman meets Saw."  As cautious as I should be towards valuing pithy analogies such as that one, I do find it enticing to see just how much meaning a true aesthete (which may or may not be Lars Von Trier) can shake out of a film whose premise, trailer, and, now, reception makes it look like a work of unadulterated exploitation cinema.

I am confident there will be much to find profound and revealing about this film, in spite of alleged grue and naughtiness.

A Daily Mail reporter in the Cannes Press Conference (pictured above) made a concerted effort to be particularly combative.  Initially in a perfectly acceptable manner, he asked Von Trier to, for "his benefit," explain and "justify" why he made this film.  When Von Trier gave an also perfectly acceptable, very reasonably conveyed answer of "No," due to the use of the word "justify" and likely its inconsistency with a certain regard he has for the meaning this work has to him, the reporter went on to interrupt him with a very stern, "No, you must," insisting he has an obligation to explain himself as a filmmaker at Cannes - because Cannes is such a big deal, ya know?  As big a deal as the Vatican.  Or a 17th century Spanish tribunal, I guess, in terms of having to perform moral auto da fe to the Cinema-Gods.  Well, I guess more like the Vatican, considering all the yacht parties, sun-bathing celebrities, and less immediate life-and-death business dealings.

Then proceeds lots of murmuring and one reporter coming to Lars' defense, proclaiming Lars an "artist" and the reporter-douche "not-an-artist," which is a defense against criticism I find a bit limited, but works in this circumstance.

But wait, how do I know this?  Am I at Cannes right now?  No, I'm not, goddamnit, because if I were, I, my brain, and all my senses (and I mean all my senses) would be right this second taking in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.  

No, there's video coverage available on the official Cannes website.  For the Anti-Christ conference, just click the following and enjoy: http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/mediaPlayer/9902.html.

Some further thoughts about Lars Von Trier's foray into the horror genre: 

Speaking as a fan of the horror genre, I would actually have preferred the film received more traditional, sober praise (or scorn)... but, all evidence considered, this response was much more in-the-cards (the love/hate/rioting/disgust/arousal).  I still lament the fact that we have a filmmaker here who has evoked incredibly precise, incredibly stimulating sociological treatises in his previous films, and when he makes his big, high-profile leap into the horror genre, remarks about the film's philosophical "plumbings" seem relegated to the usual horror tropes of "the depths of depravity and evil," and this idea of taking the genre to the "extremes" of abject violence as if that's the only place for horror films to meaningfully go.  I would've much preferred an alternate universe where Von Trier came up with a film consisting of scares and supernatural elements that tackled his usual lofty, highly discursive subject matter, instead of him exploring what are essentially the excesses of the horror genre - although, again, I look forward to this film greatly and expect a lot from it.  It doesn't seem like Lars did much to "class up" the genre, though... not that I necessarily would have wanted that.  Films like The Orphanage are said to class up the horror genre... and man was that film boring and often the opposite of classy.  What I ideally wanted was a classic philosophically-dense and challenging Von Trier dissertation that happens to be scary.  But I am very cool with what it seems like we've got - a mood piece-turn-shock cinema nightmare painting from a thinking-man provocateur.

THAS: Tobe Hooper's EGGSHELLS screened at the SXSW '09 Film Festival!

It turns out Tobe Hooper's very first film, his 1969 experimental film Eggshells, was specially screened last Tuesday, March 17th, at the SXSW (South-By-Southwest) Film Festival in the town of its very making - Austin, Texas - where, as a film student at the University of Texas, Hooper made this very first venture into feature-length filmmaking! Screened at the Alamo Drafthouse, Hooper himself was in attendance...  Hot damn, to have been there!

Allegedly the Texas counter-culture flick to end all Texas counter-culture flicks, the film is undergoing restoration now by Watchmaker Films and is apparently looking forward to a home video release by next year!  Color me psyched.  Color me psychedelic, in fact!

"Time and Spaced Film Fantasy"?  "An American Freak Illumination"?  We shall see someday, hopefully, if the film can live up to its absolutely golden [baked] taglines.

Some links:

Cinematical's report from the screening

Admiring review by Austin Chronicle's Louis Black

Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2009)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest film Tokyo Sonata is an unabashed message film, clearly making concerted effort to get across on-the-nose observations about the modern world and contemporary society to the viewer. This includes issues such as the family unit, militarism, the financial bedrock of common living, and, in classic Kiyoshi Kurosawa fashion, generation gaps and the plight of the underestimated female. Yes, the K-man has never been coy with his hyper-vivid worldviews, but never has he been particularly plain-spoken, or tied to the literal. Here he is not setting his sights on the art-house audience. Instead of his usual MO, which is to work so heavily in allegory and microcosm, here he is willfully working towards heightening social perception by taking on simplicity and straight-forwardness.

This is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Milk. As Gus Van Sant does in his new film, Kurosawa seems to have also resolved not to stew any longer in the dark, mysterious recesses hid deep within inaccessible, repressed society -- a log line which very much describes both Kurosawa and Van Sant's output prior to 2008. There's nothing mysterious about an ordinary family, nor about their being brought to a breaking point by ordinary pressures of common life, nor about its all being result of the ordinariness of nations and their ideals of social order.

Cast off is the cryptic, for the most part, for both Van Sant and Kurosawa. Both resolve to engage with the prosaic, hectic, and rather dreary public world (be that politics or white-collar bubbles) by taking on society and hegemony, by loudly calling out the failings of the masses that think they do not have anything to hide, and by being so clearly proactive against common regimes of thought and "Elephant-in-the-Room" mores, that their bright, shining, near embarrassingly boisterous films will reach, inspire, and alight even a cinema philistine.

 Both filmmakers pull back on the art-house reins considerably, but manage to mix their art-house habits quite successfully with stories that often seem intentionally barbed and armor-fitted with story material and emotional hooks that verge on after-school special territory.

This time around, there is no need to brace yourself against numbing existential conclusions convinced of life's ephemera. This is a socially minded picture, and what is social-mindedness if not an effort to instill hope for continuance, progress, and change? It is this explicit campaign for change, through a plot engaged to the literal world, that rails this latest picture on a different track from Kurosawa's previous films. Even the film's nearest conduit to existential stupor - the mother character's escapade of longing - takes on the larger (or is it smaller?) significance by representing forwardly the Japanese Housewife, plagued by her social insignificance, as opposed to just a woman, plagued by her very existential being, as is depicted in Kurosawa's harrowing Seance (about a depressive female psychic who goes to terrible extremes to alleviate deadening, deeply-rooted feelings of existential worthlessness).

Tokyo Sonata is said to be Kiyoshi Kurosawa absorbing and filtering Ozu, but then again, it is also the turn-of-phrase in conversation about this film that Tokyo Sonata is still an odd and offbeat Kiyoshi Kurosawa concoction. Some are loving Kurosawa's fusing of his tried-and-true hyper-allegorical renderings with his more novel stab at social realism. Others think his penchant for the odd and off-kilter undermines the worldly wisdom.

In the end, the film is an uneven mix of moments of inspiration and moments of banality; moments of true power and moments of incredulity; scenes of incredible beauty and scenes of social laffs so telegraphed and run-of-the-mill you wonder when's the Kurosawa ghost gonna finally pop out. The cons listed are ultimately attributable to both the overstated social drama originally aimed for as well as the mild Kurosawa mindfuck that eventually has emerged, as the fusion is a bit awkward. When the film is working as a social drama, it spins its wheels for the most part with the broadest social observations and situations. I don't really warm to Kurosawa's sense of humor (Kurosawa's License to Live is a great dark allegory marred by his unfortunate inclination for quirk), and here it's used to drag out unfunny caricatures, most dealing with making the father as pampered as possible (e.g. his worshiping his friend's mock cell phone conversations and his prissiness as a janitor). When turned around as a super-expressionistic Kurosawa film, his oddball flourishes come off a bit hoary and reveal his writing is often dependent on the use of proliferate metaphors, not reality-based observation. When the story is as literal-minded as it is here, his love for open metaphors ("Someone please help me up," or "I've come this far" - both quotes from the mother, unsurprisingly) just seems overly vague, thrown in there without the meat of reality to support it -- which is a problem when your film has such an agenda to be more meat and less philosophy. When the surreal, expressionistic plot developments, character interactions, and abstract flourishes rear their head in the latter half of the picture, their abruptness made them a cliche of the Kurosawa kind. Of course, the "Kiyoshi Kurosawa cliche" is a very special type of cliche, but, even if it were not for the contrast between hyper-realism and hyper-allegory found here, the absurdist gestures of Tokyo Sonata are a bit hackneyed.

The film is best when, of course, it finds the happy medium between accessible and weird. As it turns out, apparently the film's development was not entirely a harmonic one: Aussie co-writer Max Mannix had originally written the film to be a very Ozu-like, "neo-realist" look at a contemporary Japanese family, without whimsical interruptions (indeed Kurosawa had significantly re-worked it to his own vision, with such interruptions). But despite my misgivings, I am glad Kurosawa ran off with it: the feverish and dreamy climactic act is a fine reminder just how good Kurosawa is at the abstract and the ethereal.

A few more nagging flaws: a subplot with a fellow down-and-out businessman is a distraction, laying at the center of the film's "prosaic" middle-section, and its awfully premature discarding deems it ultimately useless. I had an issue with the casting as well, this character being casted in a way that I thought him much younger than our protagonist, when they were supposed to have gone to school together. This would not be so much of a problem if it didn't just serve to highlight that this depicted 2nd family (the family of the friend) functions solely as a redundant mirror of the main family, when something possibly more interesting could have been done if they mixed it up a bit, for instance if the friend actually was of a younger generation.

Second, you know that scene when the mother goes all Bonnie Parker and returns to the thief all rawr and "You know you're glad to see me, let's drive!"? Then she retracts the convertible roof and says "I've come this far"? Well, we all saw that bit coming, as crowd-pleasing as it is.  In general, the mother's third act development is perhaps too incredulous and the thief seems inessential and incongruous to the rest of the film.  His being a portrait of failure is an effective point, potently filmed, but he is a sole cartoon character in midst of steady husbands and fathers that fill the rest of the picture.

Lastly, there is another subplot involving the US military and Japan that seems more suited for the more farcical satire of something like The Host than this film. It is a bit thuddingly presented, but I appreciated the plain-spoken hypothetical nature of it. It also leads to a very clear-headed and moving final word for a pivotal character. The excellence of this particular plot thread's closure is an evaluation that probably applies to the film as a whole: despite the rough and uneven ride we are given throughout the film, the resolutions and finishing touches the film finally offers us are all of stunning clarity -- for instance, the climax being the literal dissemination of the family, and the resolution being their ironic, simultaneous coalescence to a stunned breakfast table (with a repeating angle that is reprised for each character's entrance). And then there's the final scene, which is truly resplendent in its simplicity.

Tokyo Sonata - 7/10