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gwynlovesdrum · 4 years

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SETSUNA after headcanons~

I love all of the headcanons made by this wanting-to-grow fandom! So here, accept my headcanons of Setsuna being a Soryuin, because I still cry how he said goodbye to Shion and Tomoko

After the Tournament Shion actually adopted Setsuna as her little brother

It made Setsuna Akemi (Dumbbell) ’s big brother and she fell in love with his body, ofc

Akemi’s friends thought Setsuna is her real brother because they have the same face expressions (they actually do)

Setsuna really pays attention to not make Akemi and Shion uncomfortable. Being the only man in the household he always wears buttoned up long sleeve shirt and jeans, he even got used to sleep in pajamas

He left his ohma plush on the island...

Mother Soryuin only met Setsuna once. She thought he’s a woman PLUS she immediately accepted what she misunderstood: Setsuna&Shion love life. Shion had to correct her.

Setsuna knows that Shion is still in love with Hatsumi and understands that letting the first love go is almost impossible

Because Akemi was curious about his life, Setsuna told her one night... It made Akemi cry till midnight. For her Setsuna is a “must protect”

On the other hand, Akemi got shocked when she got know Setsuna killed Ozu Toshio

Akemi sometimes talks with Setsuna that he should get into a relationship, so that would help his PTSD and all his pain from the past, but Setsuna is not confident about it

Tomoko introduced him into the world of fanfictions

Setsuna always reads her fanfics

Shion and Tomoko made him trying to write his own story with his own life. It definitely helped his mental health

Setsuna actually feels himself much closer to Tomoko

Setsuna has no idea what’s a mother-child bond, but when he accidentally fell asleep on Tomoko’s lap on a trip, he saw himself as a kid in his dream, felt fragile but safe

His first birthday in the Soryuin residence was forgotten even by Sestuna. Only Tomoko remembered. When she appeared with a cake infornt of him, Setsuna felt the strange owerflowing warm in his chest first in years (or maybe in his life)

Setsuna still wandering around Koyo Woman University when he can’t spend time with his three sisters (Akemi, Shion, Tomoko)

He likes all of his friends from the uni even if he forgets all of their names sometimes

He refuses to attend any lectures. He can see his friends’ suffering from it and he finds it pointless

BUT he spends the new years to go with the university girls to temples. Everyone pray to get good grades and pass, while Setsuna prays for everyone to get good grades and pass because he sees it’s important for them

He always helps out the Koyo sport clubs. Together with the girls he plays basketball, volleyball, etc.

He especially enjoys to play handball with Raian’s little sister

Once Raian had to cover for his sister so he had to visit the office of the uni. He met Setsuna on the way and started to provoking him, but since Setsuna didn’t remembered him at all, he moved on

Jezz I wrote a lot and I could make more... Those who love Kengan still gonna read it so <3 I have some for Raian as well, I’ll write down one day What do you think about Setsuna and his life as a Soryuin?

#kengan ashura #dumbbell nan kilo moteru?#how many kilograms are the dumbbells you lift?#dumbbell #akemi soryuin #shion #tomoko #setsuna #raian #hatsumi #headcanons

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sofiadearos · 4 years

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Any animal is more elegant than this book: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Unfortunately, this has to be the top contender for the worst “good” book I’ve read to date. So many words, so little substance– I’m shocked at how many words can be written about nothing much. I really wanted to like this book, guys, I really did. I liked Heidi Sopinka’s “The Dictionary of Animal Languages”, which has the same stylistic fragrance that Hedgehog attempts.

The difference?

The narrator of Languages brightened my world, while I was suffocated by the alternating narrators here, named Renee and Paloma.

Renee is a concierge approaching her sixties while Paloma is a twelve-year-old intellectual prodigy who loves writing in her journal and wrist-wringing over the constant trauma of living in, uh, a patently elite apartment complex in a gorgeous Paris neighbourhood where she is surrounded by relatively pleasant people and their pampered pets. Renee, who unflinchingly pronounces herself as stout and ugly, works in this apartment complex, and takes extreme precautions to ensure that the residents never find out that she is passionate about fine art, loves experimental cinema, and worships the literary canon. She also has a cat named Leo, after Leo Tolstoy, and is at all times paralysingly worried that the residents will get the reference.

First of all, the central premise is questionable and absurd in that it goes great lengths to cloyingly counterpreach the stigmatisation of something that may not even be a stigma. The book in 140 characters or less: a concierge affectedly and pompously demonstrates that it is okay for her to be intelligent. Here’s an excerpt:

“Concierges do not read The German Ideology; hence, they would certainly be incapable of quoting the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. Moreover, a concierge who reads Marx must be contemplating subversion, must have sold her soul to the devil, the trade union. That she might simply be reading Marx to elevate her mind is so incongruous a conceit that no member of the bourgeoisie could ever entertain it.”

The problem with this is that I don’t think anyone in the apartment complex would care if they found out that Renee was intelligent. Renee takes up half her narrative time belabouring how difficult it is to be someone who betrays societal expectations by being a smart concierge. Not once is her delusional hypothesis put to the test. Not once was Renee allowed to wonder whether, in fact, people had something against smart concierges at all. If she were, this brittle plotline would disappear and invalidate the whole book.

Second, there are many characters living in the apartment complex, and I was interested in getting to know them. Colombe, Paloma’s older sister, was especially interesting! I did my best to piece together a portrait of her through Paloma’s exasperatingly condescending and hate-filled journal entries. I couldn’t help but feel that the fake-deep so-called “social commentary” was self-defeating and managed to destroy the storytelling. Where’s the due social commentary about hypocrites? You won’t find it in this book narrated by snobs devoid of self-reflexivity. What’s worse is that the musings of Renee and Paloma are less sincere social commentary than snooty flexings of how brutally they can tear down other people. The other characters are ruthlessly flattened and it’s a shame, because I don’t know if this is entirely necessary. The narrators sentimentally and self-importantly capitalise the words “beauty”, “art”, and “humanity” but their intellectual posturing is soulless and regrettably anti-humanity and unbeautiful. They’re so deep in their heads that they’re not ruminating on the human condition at all— they use other people as sandpaper against which to sharpen their mean verbal acrobatics. This is so blatantly their point and I rolled my eyes when Renee called herself a prophet for contemporary times or whatever. What’s the point of endlessly contemplating beauty and art when you spend hours and hours overarticulating how other people are worthless? I was not impressed by their devotion to jasmine tea and camellias. Reading about mean people is fun when the whole thing is graced with irony, when the author is so fully in on it. But the narrative voices of Paloma and Renee are so strikingly identical that I can’t help but feel that the author, Muriel Barbery, is writing with minimum effort, writing so close to her own heart that there isn’t much space for self-irony or self-parody. I could be wrong though. I also took note of how Japan was depicted in this book— all hype, no depth. This contrasts with how Paloma conflates Asia with poverty in talking about a Thai boy adopted by a French family:

“And now here he is in France, at Angelina’s, suddenly immersed in a different culture without any time to adjust, with a social position that has changed in every way: from Asia to Europe, from poverty to wealth.”

I know she’s 12, but it struck me. Japan in this book is fetishised and immediately valued exclusively because of a handful of its cultural exports. Sushi, bonzai, haiku, Ozu, the traditional bow, and wabi-sabi are briefly mentioned. That’s all. What’s afforded is the Google-able iconography. The book goes no deeper, and the peppering of Japanese references did nothing to re-posture the characters, which is what it seemed to be going for. Kakuro, the Japanese man introduced to change the narrator’s lives, was so thinly written. Extras in KDramas have received richer characterization. I was baffled as to why he, poised ummistakably as the pivotal character, was paper-thin and dimensionless, when the other characters were described with such precision albeit disdainfully. He “changes their lives” because the plot said so. One last thing: this book was published in 2009, before discourse on mental health became more widespread. Words such as “anorexic”, “autistic”, and “retarded” are used a couple of times as adjectives, usually in derogatory contexts, which will date the book.

Man. I really wanted to like it.

Somewhat related recommendations:

“Pure Heroines”, an essay included in Jia Tolentino’s bestselling collection “Trick Mirror”. The essay explores the tropes performed by female literary characters, i.e. as children, they’re exceedingly crafty and prematurely disillusioned by their environment, and the plot hinges on how gloriously they can rewire themselves to escape it all; as teens, like Paloma, they’re angsty and hot and intellectual; and as grown women, they become casualties of certain institutions, such as religion, marriage, or what have you, and eventually kill themselves. Paloma, in this case, is a suicidal teenager. Interesting.

“The Dictionary of Animal Languages” by Heidi Sopinka. Also set in Paris. Also about an art-loving woman. Language is also somewhat florid but oftentimes delectable. Is a plotty book but doesn’t read as plotty, because it’s configured so diaristically. A sweet-smelling collection of painterly phrases.

#books

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dweemeister · 7 years

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Tokyo Twilight (1957, Japan)

I haven’t been a classic movie fan for as long as some fellow amateur writers on movies, and I've only been delving into older live-action Japanese films within the last ten years. Having only made Akira Kurosawa’s acquaintance in 2010 and Kenji Mizoguchi’s after that, my first viewing of a Yasujirô Ozu film was in 2012, with his Early Spring (1956) – the work that preceded the subject of this write-up, Tokyo Twilight. A half-decade later to that introduction to Ozu, I am beginning to realize – like the plays of Shakespeare, the animated movies of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Studio Ghibli, the symphonies of Beethoven, and any other continuum of challenging, worthwhile art – that it will take me a lifetime to become familiar with Ozu’s movies. Bar any unforeseen developments in my health, there is plenty of time to do so.

For on the surface, the director’s works are filled with the tatami shots and pillow shots that I have written about numerous times on this blog. Beyond that, Ozu’s humanity, the intricacies of mundane human life, and his attention to individuals between moments of catharsis or tragedy reflect a philosopher-artist fully in control of the artform he specializes in.

Tokyo Twilight is considered Ozu’s darkest film, and it’s certainly the darkest Ozu film I have yet to see – it is not recommended for those who never seen an Ozu movie before. This darkness is based not in what the film depicts – remember, Ozu never shows the most traumatic moments (Chieko Higashiyama’s character dies off-screen in 1953′s Tokyo Story) or even a character’s greatest celebrations or victories (the buildup to Setsuko Hara’s wedding in 1949′s Late Spring is essential to that film’s plot, but the wedding itself is skipped over) – but how it impacts the characters we come to know intimately and make us care for them. Tokyo Twilight, with that apt title, would be Ozu’s final film in black-and-white.

Banker and single father Shukichi Sugiyama (Chishû Ryû) is looking forward to spending time with his eldest daughter, Takako (Setsuko Hara), as she is returning home from the aftermath of an unhappy, perhaps abusive, marriage. Takako is also bringing home her young daughter, who is just learning how to walk. Youngest daughter Akiko (Ineko Arima) is learning English shorthand and she, too, is having significant other troubles with Kenji (Masami Taura). One evening while searching for Kenji, Akiko stumbles upon a mahjong parlor owner named Kisako (Isuzu Yamada), who claims to have been an old neighbor of the Sugiyamas many years ago. Even for a neighbor, Kisako seems to know more about the Sugiyama family than she should, instantly making Akiko suspicious. In Tokyo Twilight’s second half, the two most important subplots emerge: the identity of Kisako is deduced by Takako and Akiko becoming pregnant thanks to a boyfriend who could not care less.

Ozu, considered one of the greatest of filmmakers and one-third of the trinity of great Japanese directors (alongside Kurosawa and Mizoguchi) and sometimes framed as unassailable by his less critical supporters, addresses one of his storytelling weaknesses with co-screenwriter Kôgo Noda. That weakness: Ozu has always excelled in crafting stories from the viewpoints of elders or parental figures, not so much their children. And when those children are as young as those found in I Was Born, But... (1932) or Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947), Ozu’s depiction of children – though well-meaning, and sufficiently funny when needed to be in his comedies – never adopts their perspective, but frames their experiences through the behaviors and expectations of the adults in the movie. Having seen only one teenager as a central character in an Ozu film (Miyuki Kuwano in 1958′s Equinox Flower), my sampling size is too small to draw any conclusions – but I can’t imagine Ozu and Noda were any better with depicting teenagers. Hara and Yamada are playing young women here and, unusually in Ozu’s earlier post-silent era movies, Tokyo Twilight centralizes their fears, desires, joys, and disappointments for the plot – not that this marginalizes the father’s concerns.

Akiko and Takako are not content to care for their father alone, but to assert their independence. Takako, as the oldest, is not the stereotypically submissive woman so often found in Japanese narratives, and will not tolerate her husband’s inebriation and boorish behavior. We don’t know whether Takako married her husband out of love or some other means, but so often in Japanese cinema one would expect the battered wife to stick it out or openly fight with him. Takako knows better than to bother. Streaks of independence are even more pronounced with Akiko, who is more Westernized and enjoys being a rebel without a cause (this characterization might be the most problematic, as Ozu and Noda refuse to look into why Akiko might be acting this way – instead, Ozu and Noda prefer to have Mr. Sugiyama wallow in self-pity and express his sadness about how he raised his daughters). Among the adult daughters that appear in Ozu’s films, Akiko might be the least trusting, least reliant, and most manipulative towards her parent and other elders.

And yet despite their attempts to escape from the traditional trappings of marriage, the Confucian-influenced relationships between children and parents, or both, Akiko and Takako find the past to be inescapable. In conjunction with Yuuharu Atsuta’s pillow shots – unlike previous Ozu movies – are kept to confined spaces inside buildings or at the end of cluttered walkways. Gone are the expansive shots of a morning or afternoon sky, the flowing windswept grasses of a hillside or a berm leading up to train tracks. Instead of those relaxed pillow shots, Tokyo Twilight features pillow shots including the uncertainty that comes with darkness (almost all of the pillow shots appear during nightfall, let alone twilight), the confining angles of the home and other familiar buildings. The past, before and after those pillow shots, is built over years by the “little white lies” that parents tell their children. Perhaps the lies that your parents told you are not as serious as those eventually revealed by Tokyo Twilight’s conclusion. But at its essence, Tokyo Twilight is a piece depicting the last vestiges of childhood innocence (maintained by parental prevarication) stripped away, and how damaging that can be.

Tokyo Twilight is the most plot-centric of the Ozu-Noda collaborations. With multiple plot twists – to even have one plot twist in an Ozu movie is uncommon – and verbal conflict more visceral than usual, this is not the placid meditation that longtime Ozu fans who have never seen Tokyo Twilight before might expect this film to be. It is, oftentimes bitter, disillusioned. The two women of Tokyo Twilight are suffering from a lack of love demonstrated by their partners and the adults – persnickety and gossiping – surrounding them. Such developments are unsustainable for any human being after years of misdirections and separations. Maybe someday Akiko and Takako will accept the indiscretions of their father, their elders, and their friends as the behavior of men and women unable to imagine life in any other way. Maybe someday Akiko and Takako may find the room to forgive those who did not love them as much as they should have. But that will not happen in Tokyo Twilight or immediately after the movie’s defining tragedy – which, in true Ozu fashion, is never shown, only talked about and reacted to.

Twenty-five years old when the film was released, Ineko Arima (Equinox Flower, 1959′s The Human Condition I: No Greater Love) almost never smiles for the 140-minute runtime. For a Japanese movie, in this specific modern culture where women smiling is an uncodified tradition, that is unthinkable. Arima gives the performance of the movie, reflecting an emotional and motivational emptiness that might have been glossed over by Setsuko Hara’s smile in any other Ozu movie. To maintain that disposition for the length of the film and to earn the audience’s empathy is an enormous undertaking, and the young actress has outdone herself here. Despite a history of Ozu and Noda underwriting or refusing to give the adult children the focus of the story, Arima capitalizes on the rich writing offered to her from the screenwriters here.

This would be the third-to-last film Setsuko Hara would make with Ozu, with almost a decade’s worth of stunning performances under his direction. Tokyo Twilight marked the end of Hara, in an Ozu movie, playing a daughter of Chishû Ryû’s that other characters think should have been married long ago. Playing the older sister (possibly because, approaching forty years of age, Hara could not plausibly play the unmarried daughter to Japanese audiences any longer), the character of Takako is one of the least obedient characters Hara played in an Ozu film. The trademark smile is there, though offset quite often with her behavior towards Isuzu Yamada’s character. it is not the most memorable Hara performance, but this would not be the last time Hara would play an older sister character. If Hara had continued her career after Ozu’s death, performances like Tokyo Twilight might instead be used an example of Hara’s versatility rather than a deviation from typical Hara roles.

The veteran Ryû –who appeared in fifty-two of Ozu’s fifty-four films (including Ozu’s seventeen lost and partially surviving films) – is sometimes unreadable in Tokyo Twilight, but this plays to the film’s characterizations. It is an assured performance drawing deep from his acting experience. As Mr. Sugiyama, reserved and exhausted amid post-War change, Ryû disassociates himself with the personal details and trivialities of others unless it is somehow related to his family’s welfare. Social change and the outside world do not seem to bother him, and he is just willing to cast his fate to the winds of that change without knowing where those winds might take him. The traumas of Japanese militarization – how it estranged Mr. Sugiyama from his family and Japanese society at-large – are omnipresent. This is Ryû playing a sort of victim; a victim who unwittingly contributes, in part, to his family’s ultimate despair.

Japanese audiences, expecting a ponderous familial drama of smaller incidents rooted in a greater wisdom, responded poorly to Tokyo Twilight upon the film’s release. Over time – at least among Western audiences and cinephiles – Tokyo Twilight has burnished its reputation as one of Ozu’s most ambitious movies, embracing plotting in ways that the director had not done so since the 1930s.

I have read from certain film critics that some of the greatest movies can help change how one conducts their life or views the act of living for the better. For me, the Ozu films that I have seen – as a whole, not any one in particular as of yet – have helped shape how I view relationships familial, platonic (not so much romantic). By how much? Ask me in another five years of watching Ozu movies and I might have a more definite answer for you. Because like I've written above, Ozu and Noda are best at writing through the eyes of adults, not their adult children. Nevertheless, these films, in their own ways, still have their appeals even to adult children.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Tokyo Twilight is the one hundred and forty-second film I have rated a ten on imdb.

#Tokyo Twilight #Yasujiro Ozu #Ineko Arima #Setsuko Hara #Chishu Ryu #Isuzu Yamada #Haruko Sugimura #Nobuo Nakamura #Masami Taura #Kogo Noda #Yuuharu Atsuta #TCM #My Movie Odyssey

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markcira · 7 years

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1. Silence

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Once in a blue moon, you will have a major studio film that asks inscrutable questions, enveloping its answers into intangible moments that don’t sing or scream but quietly stare into you, begging to ask even more questions.

The last studio picture that comes to mind was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life. That was nearly five years ago. Today we have Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Both took over a quarter of a century to come into fruition, both offer the monumental prospects of seasoned directors fighting into their twilight years, and both happen to surround themselves with the questions around God.

God as Man is a repeated theme in Scorsese’s work, whether it’s Jordan Belfort being worshipped by his league of greedy young “pond scum” in The Wolf of Wall Street or Howard Hughes soaring through the Heavens in The Aviator or Jake LaMotta being crucified in the ring in Raging Bull.

But the subject around the responsibility of being God is never quite deliberated like it is through Andrew Garfield’s character of Father Rodrigues in Silence. A man who, despite being stripped away of everything he is, remains somehow intact.

Silence is essentially Scorsese also stripped away of the aesthetic panache to which he’s built his cult following around. No frenetic cuts, no colourful or outlandish characters, no offbeat visual trademarks, and no inundation of sound design.

With the exception of the subject matter and first person voiceover, this film feels distinctly un-Scorsese.

When going to camera for the film, Scorsese's cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto spoke of this minimalism:

“From the beginning, we talked about the restraints in terms of shooting. Marty is known for his elaborate cinematic language; designing complex shots comes naturally to him. He felt this story required a simpler language.”

What strikes me the most about Silence is its quiet sensibility of a bygone era of cinema, where directors didn’t draw roadmaps for you (even this year’s brilliant Toni Erdmann and The Salesman are comparatively perspicuous in their morality), when moments could breathe and where characters are truly challenged as is their audience. This confidence (or is it arrogance?) is markedly absent in filmmaking today.

It was this calm, rational style which distinguished Japanese cinema from the overly expressive European and North American cinema around the same time.

While American and European directors (sans Bergman or Dreyer) like Ophüls and Wilder were compelled to cram as much dialogue and camera trickery into a single frame, Mizoguchi and Ozu were producing films built on a type of objective minimalism.

This trend continued. American films became louder and commanded the senses with ostentatious authority. In 1993, after Scorsese sent a cut of Age of Innocence to Akira Kurosawa upon completion, Kurosawa wrote back:

“I must caution you. I must admonish you on the use of music. Like all Hollywood films, you’re using music too much.”

Silence is not only a letter back to the long-passed Master of Japanese cinema, possessing almost no music throughout, it is a love letter to all of Japanese cinema.

It bears the fingerprints of other past masters: the obsession over the perfect Ozu master shots, the Mizoguchian use of dissipating mist, the jump cuts from medium to close-ups that Kurosawa famously employed, the quizzical and unwavering focus of lower-class society Imamura longed for, the haunting tall reeds that shroud the close-ups in Shindo’s Onibaba, the explicit criticism of militaristic tyranny within Masaki Kobayashi’s work and of course the brutal slaughtering confined brilliantly within the wide 2:35 frames of Masahiro Shinoda, the director who first adapted Silence in 1971.

It is Scorsese as something he is not, adopting the style and etiquette of a far off land and bringing it into the West in hopes of transforming a few people.

One might argue that this film is at conflict with itself in that its form is of the East, but its story is of the West. But that would be a gross injustice to the nature of the film because in the same breath, you find the echoes of brilliant compositions found in John Ford’s The Searchers.

Also found throughout are the intimate moments between Garrpe and Rodrigues which mirror those of John Wayne and Montgomery Cliff in the seminal Red River by Howard Hawks, a film about a pilgrimage of its own.

One scene has Father Rodrigues and Garrpe escaping the confines of their cabin, a safe haven, only to find sight of yes that’s right, a Hawk floating effortlessly in the sky. They refer to him as a sign of “God,” just as Kurosawa spotted the Westerns of America and later openly worshipped John Ford.

This fostering of the Western approach to cinema polarized directors within Japan. By the 1970s, directors like Oshima criticized Kurosawa, “That Kurosawa had brought Japanese film to a Western audience meant that he must be pandering to Western values and politics.” (Wild, 80).

Was there a dissolution, a watering down of one’s true Japanese identity by pairing the two styles?

The freedom to worship is at the root of this story and I think is the reason why this film will resonate for many years to come. It’s been hundreds of years since the Japanese forced their Christian converts to silence and apostasy. But has much changed?

Just this past week, we’ve been subject to zealous anti-immigration laws that force newcomers to disavow their faith if they want to live peacefully within the United States and a white supremacist who opened fire at a Mosque in Quebec.

Remaining silent in the name of religious prosecution is a mainstay for any Draconian establishment to wield power. It’s how Inoue (Issei Ogata) keeps civil obedience in his villages. He just asks that they “step on their Jesus," ensuring them that it's a mere “formality.” That is unless they want to be hung upside down and bled out.

Intolerance is the common quality to any major power’s treatment of their adversaries. It is how they justify censorship or worse, the execution of the infidel.

This is why Silence is important to me. Within its narrative, you don’t find a regaling thesis on colonialism, but rather a story that wrestles with the ideas of tolerance, mercy and acceptance.

The schism of beliefs studied in the film are beautifully married, rendering any distinction between the styles indistinguishable. One doesn’t know who Scorsese is lifting his values from. Is it the spiritual conquest of a Rossellini film or an exercise in the masochism which predominates the work of Oshima?

After watching it for the third time, someone told me, “It’s like a conversation between Jesus and the Buddha.”

Or maybe a disagreement. Whatever the case, the conversation can exist and film can offer an open dialogue between two variant philosophies, while respecting both.

Despite Inoue’s horrendous accounts of murder and torture, Scorsese’s portrayal of this “smiling Buddha” dictator begs us to empathize with his cause and despite Rodrigues’ selfless martyrdom, asks us if it’s truly as magnanimous as it appears.

Nothing in Silence is as it appears.

There’s an unparalleled sensitivity to this work in its performances, its pace, its camerawork, even its lighting. I’d like to rhapsodize for one moment about just how subtle and nuanced Prieto’s cinematography is in this film. Watch the eye-lights in the characters eyes throughout the film. Watch how masterfully Prieto isolates one eye from another by simply blocking the light or how he makes them gleam and shine when Rodrigues cries amidst the burning bodies.

These subdued and deliberate choices is evidence of a master in full stride who, despite his self-imposed limitations, is but redefining his visual flare in the minutiae.

The performances of Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are tremendous in their quietness. Starved of faith and food, they delicately portray these Jesuit priests with the cadence of a Handel concerto and their expressive eyes are something out of a Goya painting.

These are not the “oscar-bait” performances famous for forcing sympathy from their viewers. In fact, this story makes difficult any sympathy given their mission. Liam Neeson’s twenty minutes of screen-time could be the very best performance of the year. It’s chilling, deceptive and utterly convincing.

Given the moral ambiguity of the piece, its operatic pace, its asking to sympathize with colonial forces, and its conception of God, it comes to no surprise to me that it took Scorsese 28 years to produce and it comes as even less of a surprise that its having troubles finding its audience.

As the third act closes, Rodrigues’ hopeless pilgrimage prophetically mirrors Scorsese’s own at this juncture in his filmmaking career.

Does the audience want to accept his Gospel of “true cinema”? Has cinema been polluted over years, travelling further and further from “pure cinema”? Can younger generations flourish in this “poisoned soil” of blockbusters and sequels? Or is it all a narcissistic endeavour, an imposition of his “truth” in a world that seems to have already found it?

Just when we think we have the answer within the chambers of Rodrigues’ starved mind, the fog delicately dances into frame and all that’s left is the deafening burden of silence. Cut to black.

But then…some crickets.

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