April Story

Shigatsu monogatari
a film by Shunji Iwai

Uzuki Nireno is a young Japanese girl who is leaving her home in the northern countryside of Hokkaido to go to the college of her choice at Musashino University in western Tokyo. She has just boarded the train that will take her away from everything familiar to her. Her family stand on the platform waving goodbye, the doors close and the train pulls out of the station. Uzuki now enters a new world full of possibility, with great expectation and some trepidation.

On arrival in Tokyo she makes her way to the empty apartment that will be her home. As she explores its rooms and lies down on the floor, its internal bleakness emphasises her isolation in a new environment which she must now make her own. At this moment it is contrasted with the beauty outdoors of the bustling tree-lined streets that surround the apartment building, where Spring sakura blossoms now fall like the snowflakes she left behind in Hokkaido. It is April, the start of the academic year and of new beginnings. Soon the removals team arrive and fill her rooms with packing cases and pieces of furniture, bringing a sudden but necessary chaos into her new living space. Uzuki begins the task of unpacking and then goes out to explore her neighbourhood.

Being very shy and a little introverted, at first Uzuki is very insecure and nervous about her new situation. Everything appears so unfamiliar and she finds herself making all the wrong choices when trying to both adapt and to be herself. At college, her self-introduction in class goes badly and she is disappointed at her lack of social skills. Whilst it is really of little importance to her classmates, Uzuki is crushed.

In the refectory she is approached by an austere and rather pushy girl, Saeko, who wants to enrol her in the fly-fishing club. Desperately wanting to make new friends and not wishing to refuse the first offer of friendship, she agrees to try it, despite having no real interest in the sport. Just as things appear to be going well, her lack of pop-culture knowledge makes it difficult for her to communicate with the other members, and she later discovers that Saeko's enthusiasm to enrol her was simply due to the new reels being awarded to members for recruiting friends. Uzuki also endures several unwanted approaches from men, first at a cinema when watching a samurai classic, and later from a senior student at the fishing club when he attaches a hook to the front of her cardigan.

But in between her attempts to socialise with her fellow students, she makes several visits to a bookshop and gradually her singular hope and purpose, the very reason she has chosen to study at Musashino, is revealed to us. When she was in high school she fell in love with a boy named Yamazaki, a year above her. Too shy ever to approach him, Uzuki had kept secret her feelings for him, but when she discovered he was studying at the university and working in a bookshop, she knew at once what she must do. On each visit to the bookshop she makes disguised enquiries about opening and closing times in order to establish when Yamazaki will next be working in the shop. Finally her chance comes and she orchestrates an opportunity to get his attention but he responds to her only as a customer. Just as she is beginning to despair, he recognises her from high school and begins asking her all the questions about herself that she has been longing to answer.

As she leaves the shop, a downpour begins and Yamazaki offers her an umbrella from several that have been left behind by customers. At first she refuses and leaves, but having had time to think about it while on the steps of the art gallery, she returns to the bookshop to accept his offer. Uzuki and Yamazaki stand outside in the rain each sheltering under an umbrella and her moment arrives when she asks him if he is still in a band, adding that he was famous. While Yamazaki dismisses it by asking "I was?", Uzuki replies with such sincerity, "With me". As the emotional tension rises during their exchange in the torrential rainstorm, Uzuki at last makes her declaration of love, and seeing that it has been understood and accepted, the magic of first love begins to unfold.

Capturing a few moments in the life of a girl who is not only changing her outward surroundings but also following her inward desires, this gentle, engaging and very beautiful story touches us with its portrayal of the fragile, transitory moments we have all known.

Chocolat

A film by Claire Denis

In a remote town in Cameroon lives a sole white family during the last days of France's African colonies. Marc Dalens, the often-travelling regional administrator; his wife Aimée, who does her best to stave off frustration and boredom with household activities; and their young daughter France, who cultivates a special and loving friendship with the native servant boy Protée. But as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans, the family's ordered world is threatened with chaos when a plane full of strangers makes a forced landing nearby, its arrival unleashing a torrent of simmering resentments, racism and repressed passions.

The disastrous effects of French colonialism are examined through the paradigm of a young girl's coming of age in French West Africa. As France, a woman travelling alone in Cameroon, slips into a dreamy and distant flashback to her childhood days, scenes of a transient existence come into focus. France's father, a district governor, and her fragile mother are living a relatively peaceful if somewhat strained existence when a small plane carrying a gaggle of French imperialists and their entourage makes an emergency landing near their house. An ex-seminary drifter, a white plantation owner and his African concubine, and a newly-wed couple are forced to stay with the family, causing tensions and troubles that were bubbling barely below the surface to silently erupt. Sexual tensions, as well as social and class struggles, explode, with expansive vistas of Cameroon as an astonishing yet innocent backdrop. The heat, the landscape, and the underlying and eroticised tension converge as the noble and austere houseboy, Protée, becomes the focus of France's memories and regrets.

Claire Denis's beautifully photographed first feature from 1988, a loosely autobiographical story adapted from her childhood memories, observes closely yet non-judgmentally through gestures and glances, the intricate nature of relationships in a decaying colonial society.

La niña santa

The Holy Girl
a film by Lucrecia Martel

Set in La Salta in north-western Argentina, sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Amalia lives with her mother, the manager of a shabby hotel which is hosting a medical conference. When a stranger makes a crude pass at her in a crowded street, Amalia later discovers that the man is in fact one of the distinguished conference attendees, Dr Jano, who is staying at her family's hotel. She is upset but takes his inappropriate action as a sign that her faith has given her a mission.

Inés, a young Catholic teacher, is leading a group of girls in choir practice. After rehearsals the girls get together to discuss faith and vocation. The subject of discussion is the student's "mission" and how they can recognise the signs that point to God's calling. Amalia and her best friend, Josefina, whisper secretly about kissing, constantly making references to the teacher's alleged love affairs. Josefina is from a conservative family who live not far from the now run-down Hotel Termas where Amalia lives with her mother Helena, a divorcée, and the rest of her family.

While Amalia is standing in a crowd watching a musician in the street, Dr Jano makes a lewd advance. Initially shocked, Amalia proceeds to stalk him, and consumed by the heady combination of her fervent religious education and burgeoning sexuality, she resolves to save the respected doctor's soul but finds herself caught in a confusing web of frustration, desire and anticipation. Never sure whether she is erring on the side of sin or vocational service, she embarks on a mission that brings both their worlds to the brink of collapse.

Amalia's story is partly about an adolescent girl's discovery of her sexual vulnerability and the sexual power she possesses. Lucrecia Martel describes her film as one which explores good and evil – not the battle between them, but the difficulty distinguishing one from the other. She also comments on comparisons between medicine and holiness – both can lead to good, both can corrupt. The director's remarkable second feature, in which the story unfolds in glimpses and whispered conversations as an intimate series of minimalist vignettes, is an enigmatic and absorbing study of the temptation of good, and the evil that it causes.

Glorious 39

A film by Stephen Poliakoff

Set between present-day London and the idyllic Norfolk countryside during the glorious summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

At a time of great uncertainty and high tension, the story revolves around the formidable Keyes family, minor English gentry who are keen to uphold and preserve their very traditional way of life. The eldest sibling, Anne, is a budding young actress who is in love with Foreign Office official Lawrence, but her seemingly perfect life begins to dramatically unravel when she stumbles across secret recordings of a sinister plot by the pro-appeasement movement.

While trying to discover the origin of these recordings, connections are revealed which lead to the deaths of close friends and Anne finds herself swept into a web of dark secrets and in increasing danger from a powerful and menacing enemy. As war breaks out Anne discovers the truth and flees to London to try to confirm her suspicions, but she is caught and interned in the family's London house. With her most precious certainties destroyed and unable to trust even those closest to her, she comes to realise the full extent of her own betrayal and vulnerability.

A tense psychological thriller set against the political turmoil in Britain leading up to WWII, exploring the duplicity and ruthlessness of the section of upper-class English society that was desperate to appease Hitler in order to preserve its own way of life.