Quinoa1984

Chronicle of a Summer is dated in some, maybe more than some, aspects like in parts where Rouch and Morin just have regular people sitting around talking about the racial disparities of the day (actually some of this may be more topical than I admit), but the person of the psychologist surveyor Marceline, who is also a concentration camp survivor with the numbers on her arms (some of the men at this table scene don't know what it means, though eventually someone mentions they saw Night and Fog), is a particular stand out since she is the one who starts off asking questions to random persons on the street and then becomes a subject herself. But what does stand out is the central question they keep coming back to: Are You Happy?

That whole idea helps to keep a through line of a sort to what is a documentary full of digressions both in subject matter and style - when the filmmakers show characters walking around on occasion it seems oddly staged given how this one of the first Cinema Verite works (that is the term the filmmakers used, in full disclosure) while at other times like the work seen in the factory those moments have a (scuse this word again) reality that sticks.

That question is deceptively simple; some can say they are happy on the surface level, but what they are happy about, and subsequently very much not happy about, has to come out when they need to give examples to support their points. So when we see Marceline at one point, trembling like a hundred leaves in a major windstorm, talking about why she is not happy, and there is that move to show her numbers (at this point we hadn't seen them yet and nothing about her past as a survivor), it hits like a brick.

I can't quite say that every interview kept me totally riveted, and that could be because (not entirely the filmmakers fault if that's even the word for it) this was so new and the roughness was going to be baked into the process and one is more accustomed to either true Fly on the Wall approaches to lives like these ala the Maysles or with more pointed inquiries into the lives of the subjects like Apted with the Up series. But what does stick out and make the film substantive despite frankly being a little draggy even at 90 minutes is how the filmmakers are looking for a kind of anthropology to feelings, if that makes sense, and how that reflects both reality and a sort of "created" reality that some of the subjects (with reason) can't stand.

In short, this was made a the right time with the right subjects and the idea of happiness and how it is what you can make of it - and as someone points out with a clear wisdom that grief and unhappiness are not one and the same and it's important to distinguish those things - stretches beyond 1961 for as long as we have human civilization.

As context always matters, Imamura makes it not only clear, not subtext but the tex itself, that the Japan of Pigs and Battleships is under an occupation that is a form of Gangsterism. There is a reason the troops are there - they won the war - but the extent to which they are still in Japan 15 years later is not about keeping any kind of peace but a form of taking and taking (Americans = Gangsters? I wasn't born yesterday).

The shots of the battleships bookends the film, and Americans are in the story mostly on the sides, except at one key point about midway through as sexual assaulter brutes who make Haurko (a heartbreaking and very good Yoshimura performance throughout) and young woman who is only with them because she's lost her way and looking for quick money. So, if this is a Crime melodrama, Imamura means to say, involving low level thugs and bad deals involving pigs and their feed and other bad crimes, you can't look at that without seeing what surrounds them all - and more distressing is that (some of) the Japanese citizens *like* the American influence and presence.

This isn't so blunt that Imamura hits us over the head with the message because he couldn't make a dishonest or sentimental turn if he tried. Pigs and Battleships is primarily about Kinto (Nagato), one of those young dudes that can't seem to stop moving his body even when things are (relatively) ok, like there's a low to much higher level anxiety that pervades his mind and spirit. He wants to rise in the ranks with a group of local gangsters, but it doesn't sink in that he'll be the Fall Guy (or maybe it does and he just wants to get all the money he can).

This position he's in doesn't sit well with Haruko, who loves him completely against her better judgment and wants him to go away with her. If she had seen a movie before she might know better, but it doesn't look like many (good) movies play around them, but I digress. Point is, Kinto is the kind of screwed that he doesn't fully know it, and his descent into criminality is more pathetic than tragic until it goes beyond that stage, while Haruko goes through her own foolish acts like with the American sailors. Meanwhile, the Boss of the group is for much of the story thinking he's dying - stomach cancer, but its really an ulcer - and is the one part of the story I'm still thinking about (as in, is it meant to be funny or just kind of sad or whatever).

All of this is shot in continually immersive and impressive long takes and wide shots where Imamura not only knows but cares about how we are seeing people in the frames; often these are when Kinto and Haruko are in a room with others who are using them, be it Kinto with his gangster (would be) pals or Haruko with a group of prostitutes who are in their own form of exploitation. He moves it when he has to and when he does you can be sure that its meant to keep us dramatically or thematically hooked (I liked the one shot that is wide for a few minutes and then moves in on the boy reading about Japanese history, it just feels impactful on some level I have to keep thinking about it a good way).

As I said, the only part that didn't quite work for me is the subplot with the Boss and his cancer-not-cancer, but it doesn't take away from what does. The kind of character of Kinto is sympathetic, even when he puts himself deeper into this group who would love nothing more than to see him go to jail to cover up their crimes and to not be seen again, and when we think he's lost he comes back with his declaration that he'll finally quit... but of course he has to do One More Thing and we all know that never goes well. But what's so incredible is where Imamura takes this in the final act, as those trucks of pigs get taken along on a chase that leads to the red light district, and that's where I have to stop typing to give away what brilliant chaos you have to see for yourself.

Pigs and Battleships has a kind of cunning to ot because Imamura is using the sort of cinematic grammar that I'd expect more in Western/American films, such as those long wide shots (I thought of John Ford only he'd never make something as gritty as this), and he's using that language in a film that is directly about how much Japanese citizens have lost their souls to another kind of Imperial rule. The black and white cinematography is dark and brooding, like Film Noir stretched at points into a nightmare of itself. And as the film goes into its final reel, Nagato makes his Kinto into this damned creature with that machine gun and there's a wildness and abandon that is only extreme in what he ultimately does, but he is still painfully human and damaged. This is a scathing social critique and a highly entertaining crime melodrama with a few really big laughs.