Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  I remember reading the Times’ ecstatic review of it and dragging myself and my wife, Maria, to upper Broadway on the hunch that we would love it. In the seventies the New Yorker was the place to go for the city’s trendiest film-lovers, of whom I was not one. My passions were books and dance; I had no background in cinema history or aesthetics. I watched movies the way I read novels, for story and character, and a vision of life. Almost from the first moment, Tokyo Story seemed to me different from any movie I had ever seen—as true to life and as moving as Chekhov. By the time the movie was halfway over, I realized that the sophisticated audience was in tears—as I still am when I see it, and I’ve seen it more than a dozen times.

  An old couple leave their distant seaport town in the south to visit their grown children in Tokyo, and return home a short time later, disappointed but not embittered. Their doctor son is preoccupied with his middling career and his family; their daughter, who runs a beauty parlor, is grasping and callous. Only their daughter-in-law—whose husband, their middle son, died in the war—welcomes them with a full heart. She lives alone in a respectable but shabby room and supports herself with an ordinary office job, casually taken advantage of by her late husband’s family.

  Her name is Noriko, and she is played by Setsuko Hara—a classic grave beauty with huge eyes and an exceptionally wide smile, and an actress of extraordinary restraint, across whose mobile face flicker emotions that reveal a woman of deep feeling and extraordinary generosity. Noriko’s nobility of character, together with her unbreachable modesty and tact, make her final revelation of loneliness and unhappiness—and her unvarnished perception of humanity—all the more anguishing. She embodies Ozu’s vision: People die, families dissolve, life disappoints. Accept it and endure.

  Noriko is the quintessential Hara character, and in her other Ozu roles the actress suggests the same spiritual yet down-to-earth qualities. She worked for other directors as well, of course (including, atypically, for Kurosawa in his unsatisfactory version of The Idiot), yet nearly always within a narrow range of roles. She is inescapably refined, sensitive, wellborn, and almost always modern—she’s the archetype of the post-war young woman. Yet she also embodies the virtues of the traditional Japanese woman: loyalty, self-sacrifice, suffering in silence; she’s the perfect daughter, wife, mother. She was utterly real, yet she represented an ideal … the ideal. It was the revered novelist Shūsaku Endō who said of her, “Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?”

  Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu in Ozu’s Tokyo Story

  Hara was born in Yokohama in 1920, and it was an uncle, a director, who eased her way into the movies when she was fifteen. Two years later she was playing central roles, her fresh beauty and charm irresistible. But it wasn’t long before her inner depth and strength had manifested themselves. There would be no hiccups or longueurs in her thirty-year career.

  She was famously and completely private about her life, never marrying, never linked with anyone romantically, although many people believe that she and Ozu had an affair: He, too, never married, living with his mother until she died only two years before his own death on his sixtieth birthday, in 1963. He was buried in the seaside resort town of Kamakura, just outside Tokyo, and it was to Kamakura that Hara, in her early forties, retired shortly after his death, living out her long life in her family house, making no public appearances, shunning interviewers and photographers, mostly seeing family and her old classmates from school. The one thing she did reveal to her countless admirers, in her final press conference, was that she had never enjoyed making movies, and had only done it to help her family financially. Then, fifty-odd years of silence. To avoid fuss, she had arranged that her death, which occurred on September 5, not be made public until more than two months had gone by.

  Setsuko Hara has frequently been called the Garbo of Japan not only because of her unique beauty and mysterious spiritual quality but because of her early withdrawal from public life. Garbo, however, flirted with the idea of a comeback, and her retirement to the Upper East Side of Manhattan was hardly equivalent to Hara’s ruthless self-imposed isolation. Hara really did want to be left alone. (If she resembles any Western star it is Lillian Gish, whose radiant beauty also masked indomitable strength, whose ambiguous relationship to D. W. Griffith echoes Hara’s to Ozu, who never married and was hardly ever the subject of gossip and speculation—a foreshadowing of Hara’s renown as Japan’s “eternal virgin.”) And yet she retains her powerful grip on those of us who have been under her spell from the start. I remember Dick Cavett telling me that on a trip to Japan he had found out where she lived, made a pilgrimage to Kamakura, left a bouquet of flowers on her doorstep, rung the doorbell, and then scurried away, chagrined at the idea that he had trespassed on her privacy.

  And to Susan Sontag she was a sacred icon—whenever a Hara film was being shown at Japan Society (on East Forty-Seventh Street), Susan was there in the front row. I had arranged for a private screening at MoMA of one of her greatest films, The Ball at the Anjo House—a post-war version of The Cherry Orchard that was the Japanese critics’ choice as the finest movie of 1947—and Susan, of course, was on my list, and overjoyed to be seeing it. Unfortunately, she had to leave halfway through: It was opening night at the Met and she was due there. But we had found out that the following week Anjo was going to be shown, once only, at a film festival in Boston, and Susan made her own pilgrimage. How not?

  On a more personal note: In the fifty-odd years that I’ve been seeing movies, plays, operas, and ballets with Maria, the screening at MoMA was the only time she ever broke into audible sobs. As for Tokyo Story, in 2012 it was the number-one choice of the world’s leading directors as the greatest film ever made. It has my vote, too.

  The New York Review of Books (NYR Daily)

  DECEMBER 15, 2015

  OBSERVING DANCE

  The Magic of Ashton

  FOR TWO WEEKS THIS SEASON, ballet came back to life in New York as something you could love without hesitation or reservation. American Ballet Theatre, after floundering so long in search of plausible repertory, found it where they should have been looking all this time—in Frederick Ashton. By staging so beautifully two of his greatest works—La Fille Mal Gardée and The Dream—the company not only revitalized its dancers but revitalized an audience that’s spent far too long dutifully trying to find pleasure in duds like The Snow Maiden, super-duds like The Pied Piper, and the Crankotrash of The Taming of the Shrew and Onegin. Gallant stabs at Martha Graham’s Diversion of Angels and Balanchine’s Symphony in C haven’t measured up to these masterpieces. But Ashton suits ABT—and if the company perseveres, he will come to suit the big Met audience, too. As a friend of mine remarked after the cheering at the end of Fille had died down, “You’d have to be dead not to love it.”

  This is not the conventional Fille that ABT was trotting out in the 1970s, a production that had nothing to recommend it but the star power of Makarova, Baryshnikov, and Gelsey Kirkland. This is Ashton’s great reinvention of 1960, in which the traditional French tale of young lovers triumphing over parental disapproval is transmuted into an enchanting English pastoral, reflecting, as Ashton wrote, an “eternally late spring … of perpetual sunshine and the humming of bees—the suspended stillness of a Constable landscape of my beloved Suffolk, luminous and calm.” Above all, it’s a ballet about love: Lise and Colas’s love for each other, of course, but also the love that is so touchingly indicated between Lise and her mother, the Widow Simone, who is determined to marry off her daughter to the zany, rich simpleton Alain; the love of the strutting cockerel for his four hens, of Alain for his red umbrella, and underlying the entire ballet, the love of dancing which redeems everyone and everything. Even when the Widow is at her crossest with her wayward daughter, she can be coaxed into her joyful clog dance or will snatch up a tambourine to get Lise up on her toes. And poor abject Alain, disdained by Lise, will brighten at the sound of a flute and burst into his brilliant parody of clas
sical dance. He may be a fool, but he’s a dancing fool. As for the chickens, they were born to dance.

  Ashton, I suspect, was partly drawn to Fille by his lifelong adoration of Anna Pavlova, in whose repertory it was featured for many years. But it was that other great Russian ballerina, Tamara Karsavina, who in her old age taught him the touching mime passage from the Petipa version in which Lise, believing herself alone, acts out her dream of being married, being pregnant, and having babies—one, two, three! Ashton’s Fille, then, is a French story told in an English spirit with Russian connections.

  There was one Russian Lise in the four casts ABT presented—the formidable Bolshoi star Nina Ananiashvili—and although she’s somewhat mature to be playing the very young Lise, in the rapturous pas de deux that brings the love story to its climax, she demonstrated the command of a true ballerina, dominating the audience rather than appealing to it. But the success of Fille ultimately depends on the degree of sympathy between the lovers. First-cast Ashley Tuttle and Ethan Stiefel are both impeccable classical dancers but, as they used to say, they come from two different worlds: She’s delicate, romantic, womanly; he’s a horny kid. The best-matched couple were Xiomara Reyes and Angel Corella, at first childlike and shy in their feelings for each other, then growing—like a Romeo and Juliet for whom things work out happily—from puppy love to tender and satisfied passion. Where Stiefel was randy, Corella was ardent.

  The final pairing gave us Gillian Murphy—at last promoted to principal rank—and Maxim Beloserkovsky, and what they projected was glowing youth. The intricacies of the ribbon dances were easily dealt with by Murphy’s rock-solid technique, and the barnyard high jinks—churning the butter, sampling the porridge, trying to sneak out the gate to get to the boyfriend—allowed her to relax into her open American niceness. Beloserkovsky is good to look at, with his endlessly long legs and handsome features—think Cyd Charisse—but he’s an under-energized dancer and not what you’d call an actor. It was Ananiashvili’s partner, Carlos Acosta—ABT’s latest Hispanic import—who caused the biggest stir. He’s big, strong, centered, accurate, engaging—a black Cuban with lots of experience and charisma. In Fille, though, his acting was limited to The Shrug and The Grin.

  All three of the Widows—Victor Barbee, Kirk Peterson, and Guillaume Graffin—were funny and touching; the drag is good-natured, not campy. The Alains were more variable: Joaquin De Luz dancing up a storm but too relentlessly chipper; Carlos López unformed; only Herman Cornejo subtly identifying the sadness as well as the goofiness in this glorious creation. But although Alain is a disappointed suitor, won’t he really be happier with his umbrella than he would have been with Lise? So there’s a happy ending for everyone—except for those like me who, after five performances, were left pining for more. This production, staged by Alexander Grant (the original Alain), Christopher Carr, and Grant Coyle, is markedly superior to the Royal Ballet’s. Well, London’s loss is our gain. Ashton’s La Fille Mal Gardée is a great work of art. In its generosity of spirit, its belief in the power of love and the power of dance, its humanity and decency, its innocent sexuality, it shines like a good deed in a bad world.

  In the years immediately following Fille, Ashton went on expressing his love for love—in the enchanting The Two Pigeons (1961), the overwrought Marguerite and Armand (1963), and, in 1964, the radiantly beautiful The Dream, the first ballet made on Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley. Dowell (now Sir Anthony) worked with Christopher Carr on staging and coaching The Dream for ABT, and the result is another miracle of re-creation, authentic but not slavish. When the curtain goes up on David Walker’s exquisite forest glade and the sixteen fairies rush on in their beautiful bell-shaped skirts, their hair piled up behind their coronets, you’re in enchanted territory. The choreography here is so fluent, so charged, so natural, that even before the entrances of Oberon and Titania and Puck, of the star-crossed lovers, of Bottom and his gang, you know you’re in the hands of a master.

  Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, choreographed two years before Ashton’s version, is about contest: The battle between the king and queen of the fairies over her little page is prolonged and serious, and Oberon practically gloats over his victory—this is a relationship in trouble. (The misunderstandings among the humans also cut deep.) In Ashton’s Dream, Oberon never ceases to love his queen; you can sense his rueful ambivalence over the trick he’s played on her. Their quarrel is only a pretext: Its real function is to serve as foreplay to the ecstatic duet at the end that signals their passionate and melting reconciliation. In contrast, the squabbling humans are close to caricature in their Victorian costumes and posturings—Lysander and Demetrius in their velvet frock coats and pugilistic stand-offs, Hermia and Helena with their tiffs and makeup kisses—while putting the transformed Bottom on pointe underlines what an oddball donkey he is, not a semi-tragic one, like Balanchine’s.

  It was gratifying to see how this Dream gave nourishment to so many of ABT’s dancers. Oberon seems to me Stiefel’s finest role: It accords with his somewhat arrogant demeanor and gives him plenty of opportunities to show off his transparent classicism—those whip-clear turns and elegant jumps—without demanding the kind of realistic acting he can’t pull off. Beloserkovsky’s technique and strength weren’t up to the job—and why expose a non-turner to this role so dependent on fast turns? But the nature of Acosta’s technique matches the fierce demands on Oberon, and he helps Julie Kent, so bland usually, reveal a new sexiness and playfulness as Titania. She’s generally partnered by the slightly built Corella; Acosta’s massiveness brought out an appealing delicacy. Amanda McKerrow was underpowered as Titania (opposite Beloserkovsky), but Alessandra Ferri, also approaching the end of her career, has retained enough of her ballerina strengths to make a satisfying pairing with Stiefel.1

  As for the fiendishly demanding role of Puck—darting, crouching, leaping, spinning—it gave further opportunities to the company’s two brilliant little guys, De Luz and Cornejo. ABT has now what practically amounts to a monopoly on first-rate male dancers—it’s almost unfair of them to add Acosta to the mix. But he’s of a different breed from a Stiefel or a Corella; like José Manuel Carreño, whom he’s presumably being groomed to spell, he’s a grown-up.

  For these two weeks of Ashton we can forgive ABT their dopey Tchaikovsky-snippets program and even the pernicious Onegin. I don’t know why they chose to invest this heavily in Ashton at this moment; I only know he’s made them a powerful contender.

  The New York Observer

  JUNE 24, 2002

  The Triumph of the Trocks

  WITH THEIR EXQUISITE TIMING, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—the Trocks, to you—have bourréed into the Joyce. It was only weeks ago that the Kirov got out of town, and two of the ballets they were featuring—Swan Lake and Don Quixote—are also featured by the Trocks in performances that are looking less and less like outright parody. As the level of technical accomplishment among the Trock guys has skyrocketed, the idea of their actually dancing Odette or Kitri has become more alluring. Yes, it’s fun to camp it up as a Russian ballerina with a funny name—Sveltlana Lofatkina, Elena Kumonova—or a danseur from hell like Igor Slowpokin. And at least one of the Trocks, Ida Nevasayneva, is still relying far too heavily on mugging: last season, in The Dying Swan; this year, swathed in yellow tulle and prancing around with a watering can, in Agnes de Mille’s 1928 Debut at the Opera. But though the Trocks stubbornly persist in their tedious tradition of repeated pratfalls and outlandish exaggerations, they’re also seriously stretching toward Swan Lake and Don Q. Indeed, their recent Paquita and La Vivandière are creeping up on being straight.

  It’s the tension between the over-the-top slapstick, the ruthless ambushing of the ballets we most love, and the disturbing yet moving vision of men striving to conquer ballerina roles that gives the Trocks their distinction and makes them more than a high-camp joke. The best of the guys are first-rate dancers who are happily at home dancing these prima roles. Robe
rt Carter (Olga Supphozova), hurtling around the stage as Liberty Bell in the big slam-bang pas de deux from Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes, or tossing off triples in Paquita, would be triumphing in those very roles in “normal” ballet companies if he’d only bothered to be a girl. He’s wonderful—polished, musical, commanding; he’s got style, not just attitude, so he registers less as a man in drag than as a somewhat hefty ballerina. Yet because he is a guy in a tutu, he’s also very funny. Carter and several of his colleagues, with their rock-solid pointe work, masculine power in turns and fouettés, and dynamic traversals of the stage, actually make a kind of case for men in women’s roles: They give us an alternate universe of the ballerina in which force takes the place of beauty. It’s tantalizing—at least until the lights come up.

  The Trocks’ Swan Lake Act II is a happy corrective to those dreary productions we’re constantly being subjected to. The eight corps swans peck away when they’re not breaking into the breaststroke. The world’s tiniest Benno (Mr. Slowpokin) collapses under the weight of the formidable Odette (Madame Lofatkina). Prince Siegfried (Pepe Dufka) may have very little elevation, but his wig is even more ludicrously golden than those sported by so many Soviet and post-Soviet danseurs. And the whole gang gets hopelessly lost trying to decode all that undecipherable mime. (The Kirov version just leaves it out; the Trocks make Harpo look contained.) But through it all glimmers a real Swan Lake—of sorts.

  As for the company’s new Don Q, Fifi Barkova (Manolo Molina), with her Hitler hair-comb and grimly flirty Spanishisms, takes center stage and fights to keep it. There’s a killer parody of a Petipa vision scene with the corps in bright blue, waving fairy wands, and of course the inevitable Don Quixote pas de deux, carried off with panache by Barkova’s Kitri and her Basil (R. M. “Prince” Myshkin), until she breaks his spirit. Don’t mess with Kitri!