Brief notes on a few pieces that bookended our film-free Japan experience:

1.
Who Shot Otto Mueller?
2022, Birk Roheland

This is a TV series from Estonia. Otto Mueller (Jaan Rekkor), a thoroughly unlikeable businessman and patriarch, is murdered on the evening of his 65th birthday. Because he's a bully and a misogynist, all those in the extended household (plus a couple more from outside it) have good reason to want him dead. The eight episodes each foreground a different suspect, digging up more unsavoury family history as they go along. This approach works very well, channelling a strong Agatha Christie vibe that is further underlined by the manor house setting. There's even a confab at the end where all the suspects end up in the same room... Adding to the mix are some mysterious factors linking the two investigating detectives to the case a little too personally.

Roheland says the inspiration for the series came to her in 2020, after the #MeToo movement brought to light stories of the sexual abuse and harassment of women in Estonia. She says the character of Otto draws on her father...: "He was super-hard to even be around because he always said there were men and other people, and I was the other. You get downplayed every day with every sentence when you’re a girl."

Part of the interest of the series is the political background, which is touched on lightly, but is nevertheless distinctive. Otto's parents, for example, came from Siberia, a region to which many Estonians were deported during the Second World War. To Roheland, Estonia's political changes also have a bearing on the mindset of the series: "A lot of people of my generation are still very materialistic, looking for security in their lives and focusing on jobs and money. That was maybe something I needed to explain, that some societies are further on, but we sometimes behave like kids in a candy store. We’re so interested in everything we can have, and maybe in 10 years we will have the maturity to talk about it -- that life’s not only about money and power, like Otto believes."

She talks of the "overwhelming" impression made on her by Kau Manor (the location on the outskirts of Tallinn where the series was filmed): "I am a Soviet child who grew up in Soviet houses, all these big, angular blocks, and then you go into a manor and [realize that] there are people who have lived and grown up in places like that."

We found it all very enjoyable -- until that silly ending... I understand that scriptwriters want to prepare the way for the next series, but when it's as blatant as this, I just lose patience...


The pictures are from Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, 2013. Chosen for their associations with death, not murder...

2.
Dead Again
1991, Kenneth Branagh

This could best be described, I think, as a "romp". As Ebert (above) puts it: "The screenplay, by Scott Frank, is old-fashioned (if you will allow that to be a high compliment). It takes grand themes -- murder, passion, reincarnation -- and plays them at full volume."

And it's true. We have full-on Gothic horror nightmares, an amnesiac but haunted woman, regression into past lives, a rather creepy curse, and a quirky cameo where Robin Williams plays a washed-up psychiatrist... Although I wouldn't really have known, I can see how the film can be described as "a luxuriant evocation of the sort of overripe melodramas that Warner Brothers turned out 40 years ago with Barbara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart in the leads".

Ebert adds, though: "Yet there is room for wit, for turns of phrase, for subtle little sardonic touches, for the style that transforms plot into feeling." And that's true too.

So we have two time-lines. The first is post-war 1940s, with Roman Strauss (Kenneth Branagh), an acclaimed composer who fled Germany during the war, and Margaret (Emma Thompson), whom he marries. Strauss is accused of murdering his wife (by stabbing her to death with a pair of scissors), and is executed.

Meanwhile, in the present day, we have Mike Church, a private detective (Branagh again), and Grace, the amnesiac with the nightmares (Thompson again)...

I know what you're thinking, but no... Hypnosis reveals that it's Grace who used to be Strauss, and Church who used to be Margaret... (The Robin Williams character assures us this is entirely normal...) So, Grace's nightmares stem from past-life memories (finding "his" wife dead next to a pair of scissors).

The real villain -- that is, the person who really stabbed Margaret to death with a pair of scissors 40 years beforehand -- has not had to be reincarnated, because he's still around. But Mike (who used to be Margaret, remember) gets his/her revenge by getting him impaled on one of Grace's scissor sculptures (that's a bit gruesome, truth be told).

I think it's all pretty well summed up here: "[The film] is a big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama."



3.
Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
2017, Mouly Surya

This one is VERY different.

Set on an arid-looking island in the east of the Indonesian archipelago, it portrays a home invasion, in which Marlina, a woman living alone (played by Marsha Timothy), is robbed and raped by a gang of seven men. She poisons the gang (excepting the two who have driven off with the loot), beheads rapist Markus (Egi Fedly), and goes off to do her duty by reporting it all to the police. Which sounds reasonably realistic, except that she's carrying the dead guy's head as hand luggage... The police are catastrophically unhelpful. Rape kits are not available. There are no funds for rape kits. Who knows when there will be funds for rape kits?

By now she has come into contact with the pregnant Novi (Dea Panendra), who is married to a jealous idiot.

And the final act is the ultimate in surrealism: One of the two remaining robbers returns; he forces Novi to cook for him while he rapes Marlina; Novi cuts his head off; she gives birth. The following morning, we see Marlina and Novi leaving the house with the child. I guess it's not too difficult to spot the symbolism behind all that.

I'm not a Western aficionada, but even I could see references to this genre throughout. The dry landscapes; the music; the lone rider; the views down from the top of a hill...

I wouldn't exactly say I enjoyed this movie. But it was certainly resonant. The commentary it offers on modern-day gender wars (Indonesian-style) was incisive. And the headless but musical ghost, and the way he joins Marlina's mummified husband in the closing tableaux, is utterly bizarre, but again somehow very Indonesian.



4.
See How They Run
2022, Tom George

This is a comedic send-up of the whole detective genre.

It's London. It's 1953. And we're with the cast of The Mousetrap as they celebrate the play's 100th performance. But then someone gets murdered for real. The victim is an unlikeable Hollywood film director (Adrien Brody) bent on bringing The Mousetrap to the silver screen.

As the review cited above aptly summarizes, it's "a likably silly and relentlessly camp whodunnit spoof".

Red herrings abound. We have an amusing version of the classic detective duo (Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan -- his character is hard-boiled and cynical, hers over-enthusiastic and naive).

There's a constant barrage of fourth-wall-breaking, which is generally very amusing (see Neil Minow on all the instances of "meta-commentary").

And, of course, there's a denouement in a manor house, which for good measure is the residence of Agatha Christie herself...

All in all, perfect for a long flight.



5.
First Love
2022, Takashi Miike

Anything less like our decorous Japan experience than this film is hard to imagine. And I have no regrets about the discrepancy...

As the review above puts it, "[First Love] is bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired."

The central story is warm-hearted. Over the course of the movie, Leo, an abandoned-as-a-child guy who boxes for money (Masataka Kubota), and Monica, an abused-as-a-child and now-drug-addicted sex-worker (Sakurako Konishi), find a place in each other's lives. Lonely souls both, they finally have a chance to experience love, trust, and mutual protection.

So there's that feel-good thread. And it's also funny, albeit in a very, very black way. All the protagonists seem to consistently do the wrong thing, and the resulting hecatomb is so comprehensive that it somehow blunts the edges of its horrifying qualities. (Not entirely, though... It's the second in this set of movies to feature decapitation, and frankly, for me, that's enough already...)

Anyway, the way Leo and Monica get together is this: Leo discovers he has something terrible wrong with him. This is awful news, but it's strangely liberating. Knowing he will die anyway, he doesn't hesitate to come to the rescue of Monica when she's fleeing one of her many persecutors. But in helping her out, he gets caught up in a labyrinthine plot involving drug hauls, corrupt cops, Yakuza gang members, Chinese gang members, hallucinations of an abusive father, and much, much more...

Take-home point: Believe the fortune-teller rather than the expert clinician.