| Ryan Sanderson |
Dogra Magra plays at the Trylon Cinema on Saturday, June 7th and Tuesday, June 10th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Dogra Magra (Toshio Matsumoto, 1988) is a detective story the same way that Radiohead’s King of Limbs is a dance album. Many of the pieces are there, but they’re arranged in a way that will infuriate some and perplex many more. It left me surfing through doctoral theses on Japanese genre storytelling, looking for insights that would bring the whole thing together. Eventually I came to the original 1925 novel, by Yumeno Kyusako, which remains difficult to find in translation despite being very popular and influential upon its release. That novel was also regarded as dense and infuriating, or masterful and oblique, depending on the reader and their own desires and ambitions. It expressed a frustration with modern thought traditions and the coherence toward which they claimed to lead. Some believe it also expressed a frustration Japanese society held towards the beliefs and attitudes drifting in through Western literature at the time.
Not that the film is impossible to sift on its own. In some ways it can be straightforward. A young man (Yôji Matsuda) wakes up in a locked cell. He has no memory of how he got here or who he is, a total tabula rasa. From the opposite end of a wall in his cell, a woman (Eri Misawa) begins shouting. She claims he’s her brother. He doesn’t know who she is, either. The story follows his journey, beginning to end, and does lead to some concrete revelations about who he is, who the girl is, and how they landed in adjoining cells. If the primary job of a detective story is to solve the mystery, consider that box checked.
Eventually, Freud-coded Professor Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) enters the young man’s cell. He tells the story of a horrible murder—or several horrible murders, echoing down through generations, passed genetically from one person to the next. He implies that the young man might be Ichirô Kure, who recently murdered his beloved on the night of their wedding. Together they walk the grounds, the old man providing increasingly serpentine exposition with somber menace, the young man alternately gasping in horror at the possibility of who he might be or laughing at the absurdity of it all. Eventually another professor enters the story, Keishi Masaki (Shijaku Katsura), who either died one month ago or is hiding in a secret compartment in the sanatorium’s lab.
In contrast to all this complex backstory, the film is stylistically quite simple, or at least direct in its methods. Many frames skew heavily towards one primary color, red, blue, yellow, occasionally green. When an object becomes important, the camera zooms right in close for emphasis. The certainty of the approach contrasts the absolute uncertainty of the subject matter, which very well could be the point. The score dings in a major chord three times, then devolves into a minor chord, a pretty direct indication we’re headed somewhere not quite right, somewhere warped and tainted. Both the novel and the film begin with the line:
“O Fetus, O Fetus,
Why do you squirm?
Does knowing your mother’s heart,
frighten you so?”
Not typically how you’d begin a tale about the triumph of the human spirit.
The closest comparisons I can think of are other dreamlike cinematic nightmares like Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial—I’d wager the film contains subtle references to all three—although these examples all feel comfortable within the bounds of their own fantasy. There’s something angry at the heart of Dogra Magra, disillusioned not just with life or the characters and their circumstances but with the limitations of the storytelling form itself. Ultimately the film is engaging to the point that you share the protagonist’s frustration. I found it at least relatable, this young man raving in the middle of all these talking heads confidently, pretentiously negating one another, failing to mention relevant details, dropping horrific claims with a chuckle and a smirk or leaping to benign conclusions as though they’re the most important revelation in the world. It has a real poignancy viewed alongside the sea of clashing, contradicting voices our own world has devolved into, however much any artists associated could have envisioned that.
Matsumoto’s 1969 film Funeral Parade of Roses has been cited as an influence by luminaries as diverse as Stanley Kubrick and Sean Baker. It’s a really fantastic film and you should watch it. While it’s stylistically every bit as idiosyncratic as Dogra Magra, that earlier film is fueled by sensuality and photographic realism. Whatever its inception, it resembles the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch. I know what to do with it. Dogra Magra shows Matsumoto’s artistic ambitions less focused on sex and modernity and more about the limits of art to express anything near truth, the gaps between perception and reality, the horror of realizing the projections we need to navigate the world are ultimately just that.
And the question waiting when all these frustrations come full circle—who am I then, really?
Edited by Finn Odum