On the Oscars, Seijun Suzuki, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, and Oklou
I initially was going to use this post as a review roundup, but seeing as it’s almost Oscars weekend, I thought it might be fun to start by giving some quick predictions. I think of the Oscars as my guilty pleasure. I don’t particularly like their tastes, and don’t even place much stock in the awards, but I can’t look away. It’s probably the reality-TV fiend in me that likes watching the popularity contest unfold. I’m not sure I have much to say about the Oscars in general that hasn’t been said already, so just some picks for now.
As has been widely noted, it’s been a weird season. Not only has there never been a clear frontrunner, there’s been some good old-fashioned smear-campaigning. It wasn’t until this past week that everyone began to anoint Anora as the presumptive Best Picture winner, which looks to me like the best-case scenario (and for the record, my prediction since the fall). This year’s slate feels fairly standard for a post-COVID Oscars lineup. There’s one film I love (Nickel Boys), one film I like (Anora), a few that I hate (Emilia Pérez, Wicked: Part 1, Conclave), and a bunch that I don’t care for (everything else).
Picture: Anora (my pick: Nickel Boys)
Director: Brady Corbet (my pick: Sean Baker)
Actor: Adrien Brody (my pick: Adrien Brody)
Actress: Demi Moore (my pick: Mikey Madison)
Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin (my pick: Guy Pearce)
Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldana (my pick: Monica Barbaro)
Before I get into some reviews of decidedly Oscar-unfriendly films, if you want to catch up with some of the nominated films before the show, my favorites are:
Nickel Boys (Ramell Ross)
No Other Land (Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham)
Anora (Sean Baker)
Black Box Diaries (Shiori Ito)
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg)
Pistol Opera (Seijun Suzuki, 2001):
I was so shocked to love Pistol Opera that I had to go back and reconfirm that I think Suzuki’s most famous outing, Tokyo Drifter, is not very good. That film, which helped pioneer that colorful, dioramic artifice that Suzuki has become synonymous with, is bogged down by plot mechanisms, and especially dialogue, that I frankly couldn’t care less about. Enter Pistol Opera, which is basically silent, and whose dialogue constantly takes the piss out of itself (e.g. the characters love playing Eenie Meenie Miney Moe for some reason). This is a film about artifice and its relationship to a globalized Japan so as Suzuki gets increasingly ridiculous, his juxtaposition of the traditional and the modern becomes more potent.
The premise harkens back to Suzuki’s new-wave classic, Branded to Kill, with a No. 3 assassin in The Assassin’s Guild, “Stray Cat” taking assignments and facing rivals to climb the leaderboard. With minimal dialogue, frequent jump cuts, and clipped music cues, Suzuki deliberately challenges the credibility of the narrative, almost daring the audience to find a way in. That really isn’t too difficult, given that Suzuki constructs some of the most beautiful sets ever. There’s a dense subtext to the construction and style of these spaces, which draw on traditional Japanese theater and art styles as well as encroaching Western influence that’s keeps the film from becoming a trifle. The most beguiling sequences occur when Suzuki’s style collides with contemporary urban imagery. Stray Cat’s navigation of these on-location spaces communicates a precarity that I found pretty moving.
Goodbye, South Goodbye (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1996):
With the hindsight of Hou’s late-career, Goodbye South, Goodbye reads to me as a transitional work, splitting the difference between the rural focus of his 70s and 80s films and the narcotic longueurs of Flowers of Shanghai and Millennium Mambo. That’s in no way a sleight to the film, which is on first watch, one of his most immediately satisfying.
Nominally a gangster film, Goodbye South, Goodbye’s characters rot in their small town, waiting for monetary transactions that don’t offer them any real hope of moving either to the city or back to the mainland, where one of the gangsters hopes to eventually own a club. No one makes films about feeling stuck better than Hou, and in this case, the historical subjects that have become his authorial trademark feel especially concrete. The depiction of stasis here is particularly mundane, with layered, low-key dialogue that surprisingly reminded me of Altman. It’s the understatement that feels especially powerful when combined with Hou’s ability to convey the feeling of history rushing past. Mark Lee Ping Bing’s sinuous cinematography is dynamic in ways that frankly shocked me. It’s incredibly mobile, in one instance swooping over a cards table, and even includes multiple POV shots.
The trademark images of the film are tracking shots affixed to vehicles set to rousing pop music. Dust in the Wind famously opens with a shot following a train car as it traverses Taiwanese mountain ranges, and in Goodbye South Goodbye, the perspective expands to include cars. Often shot in unnatural color fields, these beautiful sequences seem to offer a measure of escape, but Hou consistently makes them feel just as claustrophobic as the gangsters’ dilapidated homes. In a way, the transience of these automotive reveries is just a more direct depiction of the characters’ wayward lives.
choke enough (Oklou, 2025)
Rare music blurb!! I’ve been obsessed with Oklou’s debut album, choke enough, since she dropped the last single, blade bird, earlier this January. It seems like every year, I’m destined to fall in love with a watery, atmospheric, pop record. In 2022, it was Kelela’s Raven, last year it was Erika De Casier’s Still. This year, it’s choke enough.
As in many of my favorite albums, Oklou’s voice here is first and foremost a woodwind texture. Despite the instrumental nature of her vocals, she’s effortlessly cool, and projects the perfect mixture of sass and fragility. More than clearly defined songs, the tracks feel like they inch towards and back away from multiple harmonizing musical ideas. The beats feel Y2K inspired, but many of the flourishes, like a flute solo on family and friends the keyboard refrain that recurs throughout obvious, or the noodle-y 3 vs. 2 vocals on ict (there’s even a metronome/wood block playing throughout this song to emphasize the rhythm on this track) feel incredibly distinctive. I especially love the title track, which undulates into a full-on dance anthem before unexpectedly snapping into a plaintive mid-tempo ballad. It feels like a dissociative spiral (“and if I choke up now, will this life grant me the space?) and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being my song of the year.