Chelsea the Cinéaste

  Made at the tail end of a decade marked by the nation’s slow recovery from war and its subsequent democratisation, Mikio Naruse’s  When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) addresses a subject at once bold and timely: the travails of womanhood in a patriarchal society. Social commentary was primarily what Naruse aimed for but in place of irony and satire one finds, by turns, empathy and a dispassionate understanding of the still repressive mores of ‘50’s Tokyo. This apparent contradictory tone in a sense parallels the heroine’s central conflict in regards to financial independence and the inevitable loss of dignity and personal values that comes with it.   Keiko, lovingly called “mama” by her friends and customers, struggles to keep afloat as a bar hostess in Ginza, the locus of Tokyo’s cocktail tradition, amidst a growing shift of business trend that promotes a more accentuated fusion of alcohol and sex. Widowed from a young age, Keiko adheres to a strict moral code that ...

  Having left his sister’s family at the end of  Mon Oncle  (1958), a bittersweet coda which I take to symbolise in some way the irretrievable loss of an age of innocence, Monsieur Hulot, Jacques Tati’s beloved and bumbling alter ego, finds himself amongst other ill-adapted, increasingly mechanised denizens in a near-futuristic Paris -  Playtime  (1967), Tati’s penultimate full-length feature and arguably his best, involved a constructed set so lavish and enormous that the director was near bankrupt when he finished the film, three years after its start date. The so-called “Tativille” blends the Kafkesque with an impersonal internationalism; the scope of vision is at once grand and restrictive - there is space within a wide interior space and, as evidenced by a now canonical image of Hulot overlooking a grid of office cubicles (this anticipated by at least 20 years the dominance of such design), each inhabitant of the space seems contented and in a way codepende...