On Friday, I went to see the first film as part of a retrospective of director Kihachi Okamoto at the São Paulo Film Festival. The film was "The Last Gunfight", a sixties gangster film following a detective's investigation into the death of a gangster's wife in a city where the gangs are constantly at war. Toshiro Mifune, of Seven Samurai and Rashomon fame, plays the effortlessly cool detective whilst Koji Tsuruta is the widowed gangster, out to avenge the death of his wife.
Directors such as Tarantino and Jarmusch have spoken about how this film has inspired works of their own (specifically "Kill Bill" and "Ghost Dog" respectively), and you can certainly see that when watching the film. Okamoto's visual style draws on various influences and genres, much like Tarantino's; there's elements of slapstick, parody, drama, lots of action, and even a musical number. Yet they are all presented as balanced and measured, one never interferes with the other. There's a certain campiness to the film, as there are with many sixties films which can make them seem dated, yet it feels almost intentional here, lending it a self-parodic tone at times. The performances are excellent, with Mifune's detective ranging from calm, cool and collected to deeply sorrowful towards the end of the film; Tsuruta also presents us with a grounded performance of a character whose loss we truly care about, even if he is a gangster.
The film was introduced by Okamoto's producer and wife Minako Okamoto since Okamoto himself passed away 3 years ago. The retrospective will continue throughout the festival, screening 14 of Okamoto's films, among which are "The Human Bullet", an anti-war satire, and "All About Marriage", a family drama. On the basis of "The Last Gunfight", and knowing that many of his films are not easy to find on DVD, I'm planning on seeing as many as I can.
My film of choice today was "The Boot Cake", a documentary by Australian filmmaker Kathryn Millard about the town of Adipur in India which annually celebrates Charlie Chaplin's birthday. Millard shows us the impact Chaplin has had (and keeps having), even in the unlikeliest of places. We encounter a host of Chaplin impersonators from all over India, all of who talk about the importance Chaplin and his philosophy has on their lives; we see a small academy of young Chaplins, learning how to walk and act like him in preparation for the birthday celebrations; we even meet a physician who's locally known as Dr. Charlie since his prescriptions for his patients are often Charlie Chaplin films (though his success rate was not mentioned). Parallel to this, we also follow Millard's quest to have a cake made in the shape of a boot as her contribution to the celebrations, a reference to Chaplin's classic scene from "The Gold Rush" where he eats his own shoe.
The film continually jumps between 4 sections: a brief history of Chaplin impersonators from the 1920s through to now, focusing more on the Indian ones; the preparations for his birthday and showing his influence in Adipur; the contemporary Chaplin impersonators; and the making of the cake. The latter section is perhaps the only one that struggles to hold the viewer's attention, and whilst this part of the film does provide some entertaining interviews, we inevitably care much more about the Chaplin impersonators and the celebrations than the boot cake. The best scenes of the documentary are when Millard simply films the Chaplin impersonators walking around being Chaplin, with Prevan Kamate's Chaplin being by far the most convincing. When you see him trying walk across a road or playing cricket with some kids it might as well have been Chaplin himself, it's uncanny. The film ends with a public screening of "The Gold Rush" in Adipur's central square on a large home-made screen, reminiscent of the scene in "Cinema Paradiso", or to pick a more recent example, "Be Kind, Rewind". Except that, unlike the sappy sentimatlism in Gondry's film, the scene here is imbued with real heart and emotion, showing how much Chaplin means to these people, and perhaps proving that Cinema truly is the only universal language.
You can find more information about "The Boot Cake" here: http://www.thebootcake.com/
