The touchstone of Paul Valéry's 'Le Cimetière Marin’ ?

This is a review of The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2013)

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24 May (updated 30 May)

This is a review of The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2013)

Knowing nothing about the film, except glimpses of a trailer, one was intrigued by a Tweet from director and film writer Mark Cousins :

New Miyazaki film for me this morning. Hoping that it soars and isn't politically dodgy.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) May 10, 2014

Billed as Hayao Miyazaki’s last film (but ‘Never say Never’), and running to a lengthy seven minutes more than two hours*, it takes as its obvious theme the modernization of Japan between The Great War and what became The Second World War, with the repeated linguistic tic of how many years behind the country is than, say, the technology and aeronautical design of Germany. (There was also an ominous mention, not least because of Pearl Harbor, of whether a bomber would have the range to strike the States.)

Truth & Movies, @LWLies ? : The Truth is that, as in Pearl Harbor(2001), it stays that way, even in British English : Issue 53, pp. 52, 55
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 25, 2014

For various reasons (on which @CamPicturehouse’s Hitomi has provided guidance), Miyazaki took this as his broad subject : one is that, although his earlier animations have not necessarily embodied the stuff and models of this technology, he has always enjoyed them; another that, presumably drawn by the interest, he is partly adapting a Japanese short story (‘The Wind Has Risen’ by Tatsuo Hori) from 1937, partly his own manga, which had some basis in Hori's work, so some matters can be laid at their door of those sources. Except, of course, that Miyazaki, whether directly or via his graphic interpretation of it, chose to adapt this writing at all…

Less specific in the film is the important matter of flying and of dream, though, of course, animation itself can be well-nigh dream itself : so one can, say, portray the vegetative excesses of Akira (1988) (or, even, of Miyazaki’s own Princess Mononoke (1997)) without a fraction of the costs that, when using a camera to capture live action, would be involved in post-production. (And blood need not look much like blood, so one can be gory, but without the body’s fuel-carrier being a shockingly brilliant scarlet, whereas most non-animation films, whether or not brains are blown out, want to be as convincing as possible.)

Flight, too, can be portrayed without the danger and cost of real period aeroplanes in flight – and so, Jirô Horikoshi’s aeronautical idol Caproni, with his 'beautiful dreams, can witness his multi-winged creation crumple, on its maiden trip, with relatively little effort (and, with it, his first hopes for mass passenger transport). Yet, at the same time, the film is not, of course, even going to mention how such efforts in aircraft design would lead to the bombing of Barcelona, by the Italian Air Force, in the Spanish Civil War (on which Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) tellingly meditates).


Here, because Jirô is, from the first and obviously**, a dreamer and consorts with his idols when asleep (although, as in the case of Junkers, with others in waking life (whose fellow engineers proudly say Das ist unser Stolz***), some depth is added, if not to his character, then to his obsession with ever improving on powered flight. (Yet one should not for a moment imagine that he faces dark nights of the soul, such as John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic ascribes to Oppenheimer as author of [the technologies behind] those bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki…).

Moments of swoon in the new Miyazaki film, but for me the adults in it are too like children. Adore his best films, but not this one.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) May 10, 2014

Cousins’ observation about the adults is too right. Not only is the behaviour often that of children, but, as the film unfolds, they even physically resemble ageing in reverse****. With time / changes in policy, but for reasons never explained (as with that non-apparent round-the-world trip***), Jirô becomes quasi-officially persona non grata, but it takes his boss to realize and rescue him under his own roof : so, in the well-worn groove of the eccentric boffin (stylish in a lilac suit) who does not deal with the small things (e.g. Alan Turing, or John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001)), he is too busy mentally in likening fish-bones from his habitual lunch to designing aircraft struts (and he eats the same lunch, because he likes it, and sees no reason to introduce variation).

A moment of tenderness is telling, because, although committed to his work into the night, he is also committed to the promise to keep hold of Nahoko’s hand : he accepts it less as a limitation, than as a challenge to be the best single-handed slide-rule***** user. As he delivers the line to her, one feels that he is undercutting any possible gallantry in the gesture (though it is both still given and received) – how can love exist in such matter-of-factness, even passed off as humour ?

Which is the film’s dilemma, that, with a main character both emotionally and teleologically distant, what real rapport can there be, and does it have to fall back on other big gestures, moments of poppies on the screen that feel as though they have been scanned from a Monet (plus - from a different Nash family from that mentioned above - a moment evocative of Paul Nash's canvas as a war artist, Totes Meer (c. 1941)), and a painterly palette of peachy skies behind aerofoils cutting through, and being supported by, the air ?

The Wind Rises, from its printed source, takes this line Le vent se lève ! … Il faunt tenter de vivre ! from the start of the last stanza of a fairly long poem by Paul Valéry (of twenty-four six-line stanzas) : Jirô and others keep repeating the words, as if they are a touchstone. To us, out of context, what do they mean, and what are they short for ? In the poem, called ‘Le Cimetière Marin’ (and set in a coastal cemetery), it is not certain that they stand being carved out in this way to stand for the whole. Which is maybe what, all along, this film is trying to do …


End-notes

* The film’s duration is mentioned, because, by contemporary standards, that is getting long for an acted feature – and, if one’s, as it were, 'animation stamina' is not all that it might be, it could be tiring to watch at that length when there is relatively little to stimulate the eye – even blackouts do not have the same effect when they are used, at the end of an animated sequence, to introduce a rest for the eye before the next.

** There is little doubting that the opening sequence will end with him waking.

*** Narratively, Miyazaki then makes the film hopelessly unclear where Jirô is next (or when), with what seems an Alpine location against whose rising backdrop he meets Nahoko, because we have been told in Germany that he is to separate from the rest of the party, because the organization wants him to see the rest of the world.

**** With a multi-player production such as this, as in the great Renaissance studios, this touch may be by Raphael himself, whereas these others, although in his style, are by his assistants.

***** A device whose purpose will not be lost on every generation, one trusts.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)