4th March 2019
Friday night we watched The Wind is Rising, an anime masterpiece that was as beautiful as it was touching. Astounding as the film itself, was the boys’ patience with the storytelling, entranced by the visual grandeur and relishing the playful dream sequences that underpinned Jiro’s ambition to design and build airplanes, amid the dangers of German collaborators, secret police and military contracts that threatened to turn a dream into a disastrous waste of human life and potential. The movie was long, by most standards, but even the love story and personal quirks made the boys smile and wonder, and feel eternally heartened by their capacity to engage with beauty and humanity, without the noise and novelty of modern popular culture. Not that anime isn’t pop culture, but Miyazaki’s work bears more the mark of the auter than most modern animation does, I’d wager.
Citizen Kane was another wonder for this weekend, driven powerfully by Welles’ own performance in the title role. The narrative was as familiar as it was tragic, but so much of the writing, the cinematography, was beautifully crafted, charming and surprising in it’s approach, that it was a brilliant piece to behold. I still can’t wrap my head around the intelligence and wit of dialogue in these films, as if the cultural mishaps of the past fifty years has so beaten the brains out of us that we should labour to keep up with the cleverness of a Mankiewicz, a Capra, or a Welles. And the plot device in Citizen Kane, the simple mystery of his dying words, driving a journalistic romp amongst the bitter remains of his personal relationships, with a masterful use of flashbacks that work more seamlessly and cleverly than anything that could be dared attempted in a modern piece of a similar ilk, or intent.
And wonderfully, closer to truth and life than anything else could have been, were left unsatiated, wondering, wishing we knew, until the final moments of the film, when ‘rosebud’ finally finds sense and purchase on the screen, given in one poignant shot that says more than any other exposition could. I wile away the final hour of the day grinning like an idiot at beautiful music and beautiful people coming together in disarming, hypnotic performances. One example, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, with Maja Babyszka on the piano. Incredible.