Apart From You

            Mitsuko Yoshikawa and Sumiko Mizukubo                

Mikio Naruse's Apart from You is the best of the silent melodramas he directed in the early 1930s. The plot of this 1933 flick concerns aging geisha Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and her disapproving teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono). The sullen Yoshio is skipping school and slipping into juvenile delinquency. The possibility of redemption is embodied in Terugiku (Sumiko Yoshikawa), a younger colleague of Kikue who has known, and pined for, Yoshio since childhood. Terugiku tries to steer Yoshio to the straight and narrow, but is hampered by a toxic home life. Does Yoshio return to school? Does Terugiku succumb to the lecherous advances of an older man or does true love prevail in the end? I'll never tell, but Apart from You's ambivalent ending moved me.

The film is superior to other Naruse film of this period partly because there is no child on hand to be run over in the next to last reels, as in Flunky, Work Hard! and No Blood Relation. Apart from such melodramatic contrivances, Apart from You benefits from some directorial restraint. Naruse was fond of dollying in and out from his players to add punctuation. In some of his features from this period, he employs this technique so much that I felt seasick, but Naruse employs it only once in Apart from You. That said, Naruse shares with his colleague Ozu a dazzling grasp of technique at this point in film history. He also shares with Ozu a way with his players. The two lead females of Apart from You are particularly sublime. Like all master directors, the details of Naruse's work fall more into place the more you see of his work. Apart from You shares many of the same players and themes in his other films of this period. As Neil Young said, in reply to a heckler who said all his songs sounded the same, "It's all one song."

Caught by the Tides

Zhao Tao       

Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides is film that spans two decades in the Northern Chinese city of Datong. Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse, plays the part of Qiao Qiao who we meet juggling multiple jobs (singer, dancer, model, and bar girl) amidst the gig economy of the year 2000. She has a boyfriend, Bin (Li Zhubin), but he is her manager and the relationship dynamics between them resemble that of whore and pimp. They part when Bin's shady dealings catch up with him. They reunite in 2022 in a China recovering from the COVID pandemic. Bin spies that it is Qiao Qiao checking out his grocery items, but their reunion proves more bitter than sweet. Qiao Qiao has moved on emotionally and the finale has her doing literally just that.

Despite the curdled romance at the film's center, Caught by the Tides is more a meditation on progress, for good and bad, in 21st century China than a fictive narrative. Jia was able to assemble the film, in which his characters really do age, from documentary footage, abortive films, and outtakes from other projects. The film feels haphazard, it leaps about through time and space shifting from grainy video in the Academy ratio to gorgeous widescreen film. Cuts are predicated on poetic links rather than plot development. The use of different modes of travel in the film, air, rail, boat, and road, denote this as a film about life's passage. The soundtrack ranges from Shanxi opera to Chinese punk rock: the only constant is change. We visit an area not basking in the lap of China's economic miracle. Rather, it is an area and culture that has been subsumed since the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam. One of the best films released in the US in 2025 containing a performance for the ages by Zhao Tao.

Envy

Ben Stiller

I was not even aware that Barry Levinson's Envy existed until I stumbled upon a DVD of the film at my local library. Apparently, this 2004 film was such an ignominious flop that it left not a trace on the public consciousness. The two major film companies responsible for its financing had so little faith in it after its box office demise that it never had a release on disc until Shout Factory, champions of pop culture errata, snapped it up. I decided to give it a chance based on the cast alone: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. Alas, the film is direly unfunny. Stiller and Black play SoCal neighbors who work at unfulfilling jobs at a 3M plant. Weisz and Poehler are underutilized as "the wives". Black invents an aerosol spray that eliminates animal waste dubbed Vapoorize. That is the level of the humor. The film's primary focus is on Stiller's resentment over his friend's success. 

There are moments of humor, but they are few and far between. Walken fares best because he is well cast as an eccentric barfly. Black is underused. The only moment that captures his comic energy is an infomercial in which he pitches his product. Stiller is really the lead here. Leon Redbone contributes a song cycle reminiscent of Jonathan Richman's efforts in There's Something About Mary, but comic lightning did not strike twice. Stiller has a good moment telling off his boss, but pratfalls and physical schtick, which the Farrelly brothers handled well in ...Mary, are not Barry Levinson's forte. He is more adept at verbal comedy linked to characterization and characterization is extremely thin in Envy. Stiller and Levinson's attempts to milk physical comedy from a dead horse flop badly. It seems to me when Levinson ventures outside his native Baltimore, the results have been feeble. Avoid Envy.