Stahl or Otto Preminger, and his appetite for the destabilizing, the magical realist, and the visceral hints at an enduring Seijun Suzuki influence. His durational muscularity is comparable to the icy, objective, sneakily elongated scene work of John M. His own creative capriciousness is employed to capture the very capriciousness of his characters therein. Those particular shots in Love Hotel gesture to Sômai’s commendable refusal to compartmentalize: everything colors everything else, adulthood encroaches upon youth and vice versa, crime manifests in the most mundane of settings, romantic love transcends binaries. Since his films aren’t bound to arid plains or industrial wastelands, Sômai also employs conventional techniques and shot/reverse-shot rhythms to keep abreast of the bustle of modern Japan. Though these shots skirt the ostentatious, they are central to the narrative at hand. As Hamaguchi writes in his press notes for New York’s Japan Society’s Sômai retrospective, the first in North America, neither Orson Welles nor Theo Angelopoulos are productive comparisons either, as Sômai’s camera “ventured out into a time and space that only existed then and there.” Rather, Sômai’s long takes organically emerge from their parent films, offering spaces where multiple genre signifiers can swirl together. It should be noted that Sômai’s films, from the pinku-adjacent Love Hotel (1985), to the purely purple big-city fantasia Luminous Woman (1987), to the muted intergenerational family drama of Wait and See (1998), aren’t constructed as a conscious series of prolonged camera movements, like the work of Miklós Jancsó or Béla Tarr.
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