KEITH UHLICH
House of Bamboo
film classics
The Congress (2013, Ari Folman, Israel/Germany/Poland/Luxembourg/Belgium/France/Unit ed States/India) Do aging actresses dream of electric sheep? In Ari Folman’s part-animated/part live-action speculative fiction, Hollywood star Robin Wright, playing a version of herself, has her body scanned so that she can perform onscreen in perpetuity. But this virtual life extension proves prelude to a larger societal breakdown that, like this month’s new release, Mad God, isn’t quite as dystopic as it may initially seem. Writer-director Ari Folman loosely adapts a novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, best known for Solaris, a similarly mind-bending (and -altering) tale of humanity transcending its own boundaries. Wright is brilliant in the lead role, particularly in the scanning scene where 20
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she is “directed” through multiple emotional states, each of them faked to the point that they become ineffably and movingly real. (Streaming on MUBI.) House of Bamboo (1955, Samuel Fuller, U.S.) Sam Fuller’s spectacular widescreen noir begins with the discovery of a dead body at the foot of Mount Fuji (punctuated by an iconic extreme close-up of a woman screaming). No-nonsense army man Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) comes to the Land of the Rising Sun to investigate, uncovering a plot involving racketeer Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), whose designs on Eddie prove to be oddly romantic. Leave it to Fuller to twist the tropes of the time to his thematic advantage: There is a woman, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), who comes between the
two men, but the emotional crux of the film is Sandy’s unspoken queer longing for Eddie, which adds a provocative layer to the tensions the film is exploring on either side of the American and Japanese cultural divide. Whether between people or countries, it is in the implied spaces where the true drama of life occurs. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.) Stalker (1979, Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union) What is the Zone? It’s whatever you make of it according to Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterwork, which he adapted from the novel Roadside Picnic by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. For the movie’s purposes, the Zone is the verdant wilderness where the title character (Alexander Kaidanovsky) leads a Writer (Anatoly Solonit-
