L'Amour Japan
Recent Frissons in Japanese Cinema
Metro Magazine No.149, Melbourne, 2006

(Opening excerpt only currently published online)

The bittersweet tears of European arthouse cinema

A staple cliché of cinematised amour French-style is the couple at a café who slap each other's faces, then lock into a passionate kiss. Then slap each other again. Then kiss again. It's the tell-tale perfume of arthouse 'relationship cinema' - a fragrant flip-flopping as a couple loose themselves in the madness of love. Early French Nouvelle Vague expressed it as a volatile mix of ennui and Eros, from the mannered chamber prose of Eric Rohmer and Agnes Varda to the heightened emotional collages of Jean Luc Goddard and Jacques Rivette. These very 'French' relationships of l'amour fou savour emotional instability in the face of clean commitment and dramatic resolution, and their ongoing depictions in arthouse cinema are persistently celebrated as having depth, realism and integrity.

Yet there is something tired about the way these dances of modern love are played out still - nearly half a century beyond the palpable explosiveness of Goddard's Breathless (1959) and a quarter of a century after the faux-French wallowing of Antonnioni's Last Tango in Paris (1974). Arthouse cinema and its affected ties to an intelligentsia that invests cinema with the purpose of enlightened literature and compassionate theatre has for a long time been a self-stating pantomime of flip-flopping as boys and girls slap, then kiss, then slap, then kiss. A self-proclaimed humanism is extolled in modern and contemporary arthouse cinema as if there is something noble and liberating in 'being human' - and as if mainstream cinema is by comparison 'un-human'. But the predictable opposition to vacuous modes of Hollywood cinema and its false characterizations is these days on par with wearing beads round your neck and flowers in your hair. A cinema that reactively spurs Hollywood's formulaic reductivism is merely generating a stance sans substance. Arthouse cinema as platformed internationally through the world's trans-national film festivals often seems to heroically 'defy' Hollywood's shallow rendering of the laws of attraction, but in place provides slackened characterisations which present 'being human' as obvious, given and boring.

These modern relationships - we might designate them 'romantic tragedies' with comforting outcomes - are continually bred in the world's arthouses, in precise proportion to Hollywood's viral spread of 'romantic comedies' and their sobering outcomes. They constitute two sides of the one coin heavy with sticky inertia: each portrays the emotional amniosis two people smear across each other as part of a pained rebirthing of their selves in the face-slapping, tear-wiping and crotch-massaging of their emotional connections.

Non English-speaking cinema amplifies and echoes the well-sung cries of the modern relationship drama, but the sound of one face being slapped is the same no matter how foreign or exotic the tongue. The 'waves' of 'new national cinema' trumpeted by film festivals annually become more unintentionally self-parodic. The cuisine smells different but the bittersweet tears taste the same.