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Series: Rozen Maiden: Traumend - Volume 1
Release date: 12th July 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 150 mins
Director: Kou Matsuo
Starring: Asami Sanada, Miyuki Sawashiro, Masayo Kurata, Natsuko Kuwatani, Noriko Rikimaru
Genre: Anime
Studio: MVM
Format: DVD
Country: Japan
Rozen Maiden Träumend (translated as Rozen Maiden Dreaming) follows on from the original series with the introduction of further Rozen doll characters, whose differing philosophies result in a dramatic finale to the twelve episodes of this series.
In the first series, the boy Sukurada Jun discovered the secrets of the Rozen Maidens, dolls created by the mysterious puppet maker Rozen. After suffering a traumatic incident at school, Jun refused to return there and became withdrawn from society. His discovery with Shinku, one of the most dominant personalities among the Rozen dolls, led to him regain his confidence, emerging from his isolation to return to school.
In this second series, the emphasis has shifted from Jun’s personal crisis to the conflicts between the differing philosophies of the dolls living in Jun’s house, and those outside Shinku’s circle of influence. Jun’s house is home to three other dolls as well as Shinku – the twins Suiseiseki and Souseiseki, and the more infantile Hinaichigo. All three bow to Shinku’s superior guidance, and know that their destiny is tied up in some way with the perilous Alice Game – a game foreseen by their creator, Rozen, in which one doll will kill all the others, possess their inner power (Rosa Mystica), and so become the one idealised girl, personified as ‘Alice’...
Shinku refuses to fight with her sisters, but there are other dolls who do not share her qualms, threatening the equilibrium of the peaceful tea-drinking, TV watching existence within Jun’s household. One of Shinku’s strongest opponents is Suigintou, who was also an adversary in the first series. Desperate to obtain the approval of their ‘father’ (the dollmaker), Suigintou is willing to stop at nothing in order to win the Alice Game.
Greater complications ensue with the introduction of a further character, apparently the seventh of the Rozen maiden sisters. However, all is not as it seems, and deception and counter-deception are played out, culminating in a battle to determine who will win the ill-fated Alice Game…
The strongest aspect of the series is the artwork for the opening titles. The silhouetted shapes are reminiscent of European woodcut prints, a style suitable to the Brothers Grimm Gothicism of the subject matter. Beautifully sombre tones and swirling lines suggest an unhealthy vitality to the forms of the natural world, like an Arts & Crafts print imbued with some vampiric life force. This quality is carried through with the Lolita-esque designs for the dolls’ outfits. The most striking of these are the classic Victorianism of Shinku’s stately maroon bonnet and rose ornamented ruffles, the cold blue and purple tones and spiky Gothicism of Suigintou and her black-feathered shoulders, and the crystalline amethyst hues of the supposed seventh doll, with the horror of one empty eye socket incongruously obscured by a mauve rose.
The quality of this design is not carried through to the anime as a whole, unfortunately. While the backgrounds of the fight sequences are often atmospherically drawn, the quality of animation of the action is poor, and it doesn’t convey a proper sense of the peril facing the embattled dolls. The human characters are drawn quite blandly – the discovery of the true identity of one character is meant to come as a revelation, but lazy drawing means that even Scooby and Shaggy would have seen through this cunning disguise.
The ideas being explored in the anime sound encouragingly sinister, but the anime fails to live up to this promise. We watch the process of the dolls being created, the blankness of their initially lifeless forms, and the carelessness with which the puppet maker discards those that are imperfect (apparently all). The concepts of trying to please a seemingly implacable parent/creator, and invest life with some form of meaning, clearly hold the potential for layers of metaphor and significance.
The promise of the anime’s concept is undermined by the poor quality of the animation and music, and the cloying sentimentality. The younger-acting dolls are presumably there to provide some comic relief, and to up the kawaii (cute) element of the anime. But the whining and shrieking of Hinaichigo, Kanaria and Suiseiseki would give earache to bats, and the protracted demise of one of these characters could hardly fail to harden the softest heart. The appallingly cheesy music makes every appeal to the emotions even crasser, with fulsome piano music swelling out on cue at the merest suspicion of sentiment. The bizarre opening music sounds like a Eurovision-styled mashup of The South Bank Show theme with someone falling down stairs clutching a Casio keyboard.
There’s been much debate about the predominance of the kawaii factor in Japanese culture, and whether its portrayal of feminine helplessness and infantilism encourages the persistence of female subjugation. Granted, this is an anime for children, but the cloying fixation of the dolls on gaining the approval of a male figure, and the implicit approval of infantile behaviours, such as referring to themselves in the third person, is quite disturbing. In contrast, both Shinku and Suigintou can demonstrate dignity, self-determination and power, but these quieter voices are drowned out by the predominance of the kawaii dolls, meaning that the prevailing tone of the anime is overwhelmingly the juvenile shrieks of those that are most helpless. The creative duo who devised the manga, Peach-Pit, are clearly talented artists, and aiming their product at a younger female audience, but the idea that the level of sophistication offered by this anime is the most that audience can expect or deal with is fairly offensive.
The anime’s sinister Alice In Wonderland overtones, promising subject matter and intermittently fine artwork is undermined by the low production values and inappropriate use of music. Its mixture of dark Gothic mysticism and sickly sentimentality seems aimed to appeal to a wide age bracket, but is unlikely to please at either end of the scale. KR
Film: Rumba
Release date: 12th April 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 74 mins
Director: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon & Bruno Romy
Starring: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Philippe Martz, Bruno Romy
Genre: Comedy
Studio: Network
Format: DVD
Country: France/Belgium
Co-directors and stars once again bring together their impressive dancing skills and penchant for slapstick in this homage to silent-movie comedy and dance movies of the 1950s.
Fiona and Dom, a happily-married couple in their forties, who teach young children at a suburban school, live for Latin American dancing. On their way home from winning another trophy for their dancing skills at a local dance competition, Dom has to swerve his car to avoid a burly man, Gerard, trying to commit suicide by standing in the middle of a country road. The car crashes into a wall, and Gerard leaves the scene.
Dom and Fiona wake up in hospital – Dom has short-term memory loss and can’t remember Fiona being his wife, though he’s happy to accept this is the case, and Fiona has lost the lower part of one of her legs from the knee down.
Being naturally – or perhaps unnaturally - forbearing and optimistic people, Dom and Fiona swiftly return to work at the junior school with a smile and cheerful demeanour, but their disabilities soon cause problems, and the head of the school gives them disability leave.
Fiona creates a bonfire in the garden of their home, throwing on all the dancing trophies they have collected as a form of burying the past and moving on with their lives, but the bonfire gets out of control and finally burns their house to ashes.
After an uncomfortable night sleeping in the rain in the ruins of their former home, Dom heads off to buy chocolate croissants for him and Fiona. However, his short-term memory loss causes him to forget his way home and he ends up on a bus going towards the coast, where he encounters Gerard once again...
Rumba is a bright film about a dark subject. The first ten minutes or so of the film, leading up to the car accident, could easily have been a short film in its own right, beginning with a wonderful dance sequence by the principle leads Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon. Everything plays out in a consciously ‘50s Hollywood’ way, with the sets painted in bright primary colours, and consciously-artificial back projection used during the driving sequences, as the happy couple make their way frenetically to the dance contest. The two cinematic forms that Rumba adopts wholeheartedly are those of the dance movie (particularly those of the ‘50s and early-60s) and silent-film comedy or slapstick, and the leads are excellent at both.
However, this kind of chaotic and virtually-silent style is hard to engage with on an emotional level through the length of a modern feature film – which, at a short running time of around seventy minutes, the makers of the film seem to understand. However, even this short time-frame gets a little wearing, despite Abel and Gordon’s clear talents for dance and physical comedy acting.
The decision to bring disability into the story is a brave one – it’s a dark and unexpected turn of events, after the sunny opening, when Fiona is lying in hospital minus the lower half of her leg. This is a pivotal point where the film could turn in one of two directions – to either become more of a realistic drama about how the pair face this new situation, or to carry on in its comic-slapstick tone.
The filmmakers (principle leads Abel and Gordon co-directing with Bruno Romy) perhaps make the right choice in keeping with the Jacques Demy-meets-Jacques Tati tone they have established, but their desire to keep the audience amused, and to keep Dom and Fiona as two-dimensional comic creations after this disaster has struck, can sometimes seem more callous than amusing. A good example of this problem is the scene where Dom and Fiona make a bonfire of their dancing trophies and gently take turns to sing verses of the romantic pop song ‘Sea Of Love’ to one another, accompanied by Dom’s guitar. Halfway through this moment of calm and affection, Fiona’s wooden leg catches the edge of the bonfire and her wooden leg slowly takes flame, unnoticed by her or Dom, as they continue to sing to one another; it’s meant to be funny but it’s arguably a little cruel – could they not have been given three minutes of intimacy and happiness without some new joke at their expense? Also, as the couple are shot from behind once the point that the encroaching new disaster becomes visible, it also feels a little voyeuristic.
The film gets its feet back, so to speak, in the last fifteen minutes, where Fiona and Dom’s inevitable reunion is delayed by a series of quirks of fate, which conspire against their spotting one another at the beach, even though they are within centimetres of one another, but it’s not quite enough to dispel the sense that the film needed a stronger director and better script to make it the kind of cult classic it aspires to be.
As a showcase for the clear talents of Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel as dancers and physical comedians, Rumba does a good job, but doesn’t quite work as a feature film, and being a little too dark for youngsters and a little too lightweight for grown-ups, it’s hard to see what kind of audience this film is intended for. JC
Film: Raging Sun, Raging Sky
Release date: 12th April 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 191 mins
Director: Julián Hernández
Starring: Jorge Becerra, Javier Oliván, Guillermo Villegas
Genre: Drama
Studio: TLA
Format: DVD
Country: Mexico
The third feature film by Julián Hernández continues the theme of his previous work, exploring the possibilities of homosexual love and sexuality on an epic scale.
Raging Sun, Raging Sky is a tale of two lovers, separated by a jealous outsider and ultimately reunited by a mysterious female spirit, described as “the heart of the sky.”
Soundtracked by the noises of traffic, rain and murmured thoughts rather than dialogue, the film begins with a seemingly chance romantic and sexual encounter between a man, Ryo, and the female spirit on the streets of Mexico City. She sets him on a quest to find his true companion, exhorting him to let love be his guide.
Ryo’s companion is not to be a woman, but a man, and the film goes on to explore a search for emotional and sexual intimacy in the city.
In contrast to the sexual encounters readily found in the gay cinema, bars or toilets of the city, the three main male characters experience visions of their soulmates which indicate the destiny of their paths. Ryo discovers his soulmate, Kieri, but their story is not to be straightforward. A third character, Tari, pines after Ryo and abducts him, taking him to a cave in the desert, where Kieri must find and save him. The sky spirit guides Kieri’s path in the name of love, which she believes will bring harmony to the world…
The film is virtually wordless, and the scant commentary supplied by the occasional exposition of the characters’ internal thoughts has a poetic style and a mythical theme. Critics have commented that Hernandez’ previous works display the characteristics of choreography, and approaching the film as a piece of physical theatre rather than conventional realistic representation makes sense of some of its idiosyncrasies.
The pace is slow, and the acting of Giovanna Zacarias (the sky spirit) and Javier Oliván (Tari), in particular, exhibit the exaggerated expression of a story told through mime or dance, a style we’re more accustomed to see projected from a stage than viewed in close up on a cinema screen. Giovanna Zacarias trained in classical ballet, and this is evident both in her very deliberate movements, and in the extreme emotion of her facial expressions. Certain scenes show a slow balletic shift in tension – as when Ryo, in foreground and brightly lit, slowly descends the stairs of a cinema, with shadowed men circling behind him, or when Ryo and the female sky spirit walk with a measured and joyful pace towards each other through the rain. One scene shows Ryo with a number of men having sex around him, their moves echoing each other in a clearly choreographed way, which evokes a collective mood rather than the actions of individuals.
As with good dance performances, the film has a certain hypnotic power, and it’s due in no small part to the creative soundtrack – while later scenes, during the dramatic finale, use an occasional drum roll or the growing tension implied by the repeated brush of a cymbal, the majority of the film is accompanied by the sounds of the city (a bus changing gear, the rainstorms that seem to accompany moments of true intimacy, the unspoken thoughts of people waiting for a bus).
The artistic team of Alejandro Cantù (photographic director) and Julio Quezada Orozco (artistic director) worked on Hernández’ previous feature film, Broken Sky (2006), and the distinctive style of the cinematography is frequently stunning. Mainly shot in black-and-white, lighting is used to exaggerated effect, particularly in night scenes where a character may be strongly backlit so that all else fades into darkness, or where the light flickers to give a sense of heightened emotion or of sinister intent. The film is intent on exploring sex as a means of spiritual intimacy, and the mood of these scenes varies from tenderness or hope to violence, but some of the sex scenes can verge on over stylised, with their perfectly lit protagonists recalling the black-and-white sterility of 1980s Calvin Klein adverts.
The film loses some of its impact when the setting shifts from the claustrophobia of the city to the starkly lit desert location of Ryo’s abduction and the final scenes. The film’s low budget is evident in the aerial panning shots of the mountains. The soundtrack also changes here from the understated noises of the city to a minimalistic musical soundtrack, obviously intended to underscore the themes of tragedy and heroism. This would only be effective if the whole vision of these later scenes worked, but there is too much towards the end that doesn’t - from the characters’ One Million BC-esque costumes to the portentous mythology of the sky spirit, sporting a spear and helmet and imploring Kieri to let the impetuous stream of his spirit attack his enemy. There’s a fine line to be walked between the epic and the ridiculous, and this doesn’t always manage to tread the right side of that line. Despite this, the film’s ultimate resolution of conflict is touching, and ends with a characteristically finely framed shot.
The positive intentions of the film are evident – a wish to present love as a revolutionary force, and to create scenes which are not just physically erotic but spiritually so. But beautiful cinematography and an atmospheric soundtrack are not enough to sustain involvement - at over three hours long, the film undeniably drags, and, as with Hernández’ previous work, it’s likely to provoke a love or hate reaction in most viewers. It would be good to see the undeniable skill and lyricism of his work adapted to something lighter. KR
