Picture, please

Films that show but don't tell

Besides this wobbly weekly column, I have been known to make unfilmed stabs at screenwriting. I had a recent consultation about one of these scripts with a savvy New York producer who told me, "It's well written, but couldn't you provide some more motivation and explanation for the four main characters?" Hmmm. The American way: a quartet of on-the-money monologues. In most of our movies (and always on TV), the characters know exactly why they do everything, and they're obliged to tell you.

In artsy foreign cinema, I'm glad to say, there still remains room for characters to bump about in the world not sure enough of anything they do to provide a running commentary on it. Scripts are minimal, and much of the key information we get about the characters is visual. But the pictorial clues are not the same as explaining motivation. In the most important sense, human behavior remains . . . a mystery.

How true that is of the two low-key, insistently laconic films showing now at the Museum of Fine Arts: This Window Is Yours, from Japan, and Beshkempir -- The Adopted Son, from Kyrgyzstan (both play June 25 through July 3).

Directed by Tomoyuki Furumaya, This Window Is Yours is the more extreme example of monosyllabic, no-explanation cinema. We know literally nothing factual about the half-dozen Japanese teenagers who occupy the screen for 95 minutes except their first names, that they're on summer break (they live in a lush, green, rural town), and that they're somehow friends. When they meet, they stand about and grunt half-sentences. Instead of talking, they horse about sometimes, kind of half-wrestling or pushing one another to the ground. The girls as well as the boys.

There are two sudden, blunt declarations of love, boy to girl, boy to girl and then girl to boy, and then the parties stand there dumfounded. Nothing ensues. The most revelatory moment of speechifying? "Fireworks are like life." The dab of a plot? One of the girls, Yoko (Yukako Shimizu), who is frisky and charming in a (what else?) non-verbal way, announces that she's moving to another town. Then she doesn't move, saying her grandfather isn't ready to leave. She stays, and stays, and every once in a while she's asked when is she going? Soon.

Yoko takes up occupancy in the house next to one in which her teen friend Taro (Hideo Sakaki) resides. He has a broken leg. He lives alone, without parents or family. Neither the leg in a cast nor the missing family is commented on! Instead, Yoko hops across her roof into his apartment, and in lieu of talking, they throw a pillow at each other, back and forth, back and forth!

What is so good about This Window Is Yours is also what makes it exasperating at times: its dogged failure to communicate. Perhaps it is best viewed as a kind of dance, because body language in this movie is everything, because we don't expect more than hints of narrative from a dance performance, and certainly no talk. And what is the dance about? Sexual awakening, though the characters here, both boy and girl, stand chaste, virginal.

Beshkempir -- The Adopted Son is also, quietly and tersely, about the same erotic flowering, but at an earlier age. Beshkempir, probably about 12, discovers his penis (we see him, in bed, reaching down there, with an itchy curiosity) at the same time he discovers girls. Actually, the girl, tall and gawky, in a gingham dress. Without his saying anything, it's clear that he's crazy about her. We see it a tiny, enormously tender, scene in which he places her on his prized bicycle. Earlier, he comes up behind and smiles at her at this Kyrgyzstan town's public movie: a tacky generic Indian musical. Oh, the sensuality of the cinema!

Never seen a movie from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan? Who has? The Soros Foundation is behind the funding of this touching, occasionally uneven effort by Aktan Abydykalkov, a first-time filmmaker with a raw talent and a distinct poetic style. Again, the script is skeletal. This movie is told visually, from Beshkempir's blessings at birth among wizened old ladies and luscious tapestries to the elongated public funeral and wailing at the death of his grandmother. At unexpected moments, Abydykalkov glides his movie into Kodak color: i.e., the masturbatory moment described above, which gets interrupted by a bird flying through the room and crashing into the window pane -- color!! The feathered creature is a dodo-looking teensy thing, like a pre-Woody Woodpecker Fleischer cartoon creation. Magic surrealism.

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It demanded to be made: a movie version of Beowulf. A $20 million programmer, shot in Romania with Christopher Lambert as the wandering knight, has played briefly in Europe, gone to video in Brazil, and now is slated for the USA in August. Variety's Derek Elley describes the movie as "a dark, poorly scripted yarn, littered with plot holes. . . . Most of the decent action is in the last half-hour, with Beowulf battling Grendel in a watery vault." Somehow there's a black, streetwise kid in the mix, and an October '97 Playboy Playmate who "morphs in the final reels into Grendel's avenging mother."