Cinema Year '25: April Discoveries
Sugar Cane Alley / Deadline / The Clan’s Heir is a Trans Woman / The End of Summer
Hello and welcome back to Cinema Year ‘25, a monthly review supplement. Our April Discoveries were a globalised affair. A revelatory BFI season, Texas’ last picture show, Japanese DTV, and Ozu in a Californian hotel room. Words by Kirsty Asher, Ben Flanagan, Esmé Holden, and Blaise Radley.
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Did you attend an interesting repertory film event this month and want to write about it? Get in touch yearzerocinema@gmail.com.
Sugar Cane Alley (Euzhan Palcy, 1983, France)
South London’s own Rógan Graham has brought filmmaking by black women to a triumphant spotlight in her season Black Debutantes, a focused curation of films being showcased this month at the BFI. The season serves to address the ongoing issue of how striking debuts by women and femme filmmakers from the African diaspora have not led to a continuous filmography, as well as giving some features their first UK distribution.
Euzhan Palcy’s feature debut Sugar Cane Alley is based on the semi-autobiographical novel Black Shack Alley by Joseph Zobel. It tells the story of José (Garry Cadenat) a young boy from the Martinique cane fields whose natural literary prowess lends him the opportunity for a prestigious scholarship. An orphan who lives with his grandmother (the glorious Darling Légitimus), José’s burgeoning worldview is sharpened by his observation of relentless and unjust cane field work resulting in meagre pay for his community, and edified by the wise counsel of the elderly Mr. Medouze (Douta Seck), who carries the last of his people’s heritage in his weary, aging bones. The theme of inequality determines itself in the turbulence of triumph and pitfalls that José faces on the way to achieving a full scholarship, as well as bolstering his innate resilience and quick wit. The stakes are high enough, and José’s community of mercurial and warm characters are so engaging, that one can’t help but feel the urge for some kind of happy ending, which is only partly granted.
Darling Légitimus as José’s grandmother Amantine gets to the heart of Black Debutantes in her portrayal of the stern yet loving matriarch who relentlessly bolsters the pursuit of José’s bright future. Amantine, who worked herself to the bone, never lived to witness her grandson’s future success. Légitimus, after winning the Volpi Cup at Venice for her performance in Sugar Cane Alley, was presumed to experience a late-stage career bloom, but she died in 1999 having never starred in another film. This frustrating mirroring of life experience faced by innumerable talented black women is exactly why Black Debutantes is such an important addition to contemporary UK film curation. KA
Deadline (Mario Philip Azzopardi, 1980, Canada)
The Austin Film Society is a storied venue. Founded by Richard Linklater, it now sits in a nearly vacant shopping outlet named The Linc. But inside, AFS shakes off that Last Picture Show feeling. It’s a welcoming and comfortable venue with an exciting international programme. Take April’s Canuxploitation series, programmed seemingly in conjunction with the release of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. Lars Nilsen, AFS’ veteran programmer, delivers a self-effacing intro before each title. ‘You’ll never come back after this … I’ll be watching Letterboxd for your pans … I see ghosts in the audience,’ but he seems less frustrated by the inability of these films to attract a crowd than he is giddy to share some truly off-putting exploitation cinema with the devout.
Canuxploitation refers to a period of filmmaking in Canada wherein the government gave a 100% tax deduction to investors, a veritable Tax Shelter. The resulting boon in national filmmaking accelerated the careers of Cronenberg and Oliver Stone, who are represented in the series, and produced classics like The Silent Partner (Daryl Duke, 1978) that took New Hollywood iconoclasm north of the border. Significantly, it’s a period that had middle class dentists pounding the street, begging for a film to invest in.
Deadline, directed by the Maltese maestro Mario Azzopardi while still in his 20s, is perhaps an ur-text of the genre. Azzopardi is extremely skillful in delivering a litany of Horror sequences, gory fantasies which are sewn together by the bitterest thread of domestic drama. Stephen Young’s paperback hack attempts to come up with big scares for a hack screenplay, while his wife’s philandering and drug abuse threatens their children’s safety. Demonic goats, pyromaniac sprogs, and witchfinding hangmen are just a few of his hubristic imaginings. Stephen is a brutally abusive, unpleasant figure, whose descent into terror preempts the vacant submission of fiction to fascism in Argento’s Tenebrae, building to a scolding, destructive sequence which attempts to destroy the whole film along with it. BF
The Clan’s Heir is a Trans Woman (Hitoshi Ozawa, 2013, Japan)
Within the constant stream of Yakuza movies pouring from Japan’s straight to video V-Cinema, it would seem like every possible variation of the genre had been exhausted by 2013. So it’s inevitable that someone, in this case Hitoshi Ozawa—whose face you’ll probably recognise from the films of Takeshi Miike or the Yakuza video game series—twenty films into his directorial career decided to take a novel angle: what if he combined a classic Yakuza plotline, with all the lineages and feuds and illicit property development with the modern day issue of transgender?
And so in the very directly titled The Clan’s Heir is a Trans Woman, before an ailing clan boss passes away, he insists to his underlings, much to the resentment of those who most closely served him, that he wants his son to take over his role. Though soon enough his men discover that this son is actually a daughter. Nana has long since transitioned and is working at a hostess bar in Shinjuku; she hardly seems willing or able to take on a life of organised crime. But of course the plot contrives it so that she must.
Careening from scenes of extreme (and surprisingly affecting) sentimentality, to ones of crude comedy and, eventually, bloody violence, it’s not a film of taste and decorum. And yet there is a genuine tenderness towards its trans characters. They are accepted explicitly as women when Nana is made the first sister within the brotherhood of the clan, even if it’s a vision of womanhood that’s mostly limited to cooking, cleaning and screaming.
More interesting is the character Hitoshi Ozawa plays, who had a trans sister he is trying to redeem himself for mistreating, and so ends the film by getting violent revenge in drag. It doesn’t quite follow. Maybe he’s supposed to be actually trans, or maybe it’s just a symbolic, if obtuse, gesture. It’s definitely more confused than it is complex, but the powerful image of him in a dress, slaying his enemies with a samurai sword, more than justifies it. EH
The End of Summer (Yasujirō Ozu, 1961, Japan)
I watched my first Ozu, I Was Born But… (1936), at the BFI in the gaps between lockdowns 3 and 4. In the years since, I’ve slowly worked through the subsequent films in his expansive oeuvre—mostly on my telly, once, inexplicably in an IMAX theatre—a beautifully looping body of work which encourages viewers to find deepening meaning in its thematic repetitions and visual motifs. It’s that ouroboros tail-eating that probably grants the experience of watching The End of Summer (1961), Ozu’s second-to-last feature, in an American hotel experiencing a power cut more weight than it otherwise would. Alone, a long way from home, hanging out with one of my favourite guys.
That isolation makes the moments where Ozu zigs where he would normally zag stick out more. Even though Ozu made the shift to colour back with Equinox Flower in 1958, there’s still a shock in seeing his famous pillow shots (sanguine cutaways of inanimate objects and landscapes that bridge together scenes) populated with the neon lights of contemporary Japan, piercingly bright in contrast with the black and white shots of telegram poles and half-open screen doors that dominated his ‘40s features. Likewise, the bowties and pinstripe suits and tinkling jazz-lite of a lounge piano seem to indicate the coming of a new era of Japanese society—one that Ozu himself wouldn’t live to see the end of.
The End of Summer is also a surprisingly forthright and emotive film at a textual level, played with a broader affect than Ozu’s earlier works—even if the steady rhythm of the dialogue scenes, shot centre-framed and head on, persists. A glance across the table at an after-works function recalls the ill-fated longings of Ozu’s other women—but this glance is later mirrored at a train station bench, backed by a few dramatic score swells to carry more Hollywood romance than Ozu normally affords his characters. It’s easy to think of Ozu as a hermetically sealed artist—the “true” Japanese auteur whose craft only became more sparse with time, but here we see surprising influences taking root. A reminder that when preconceptions and binding narratives are shaved away, artists are rarely as singular as we’d like to believe. BR