Film Carew: The Wind Rises, Tracks, All Is Lost

THE WIND RISES

It's impossible to see the final film for the grand-master of animé, Hayao Miyazaki, as anything but a finalé; to not read it as a culmination of his career, the themes that have driven the 73-year-old coming together in an intensely personal film that even serves as a kind of symbolic parable on his own career. It's a highly-fictionalised biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese aeronautical engineer whose designs were put into the Japanese war effort in WW2. Here, Jiro dreams not of sushi, but of fantastical conversations with Italian aircraft baron Gianni Caproni; and when the rattling, winged contraptions of his subconscious take to the skies, it draws the film's hero close to Miyazaki, who grew up obsessed with airplanes and has filled his films with all manner of cock-eyed machinery. An engineer is not too different to an animator: with a pencil and pad, Horikoshi turns fractions into daydreams, the minutia of industrial-toil (Extruded aluminium alloy! Rivet design!) into actual aircraft hurtling past at greater than the speed-of-sound.

Of course, these aircraft are being built to be sent into battle; Horikoshi's designs eventually taking wing as 1000s of planes that will head off to war and never return. Miyazaki explicitly spells out the film's pacifist themes: it begins with a nightmare in which bombs are malevolent spirits, dropping in terror from a mystical mothership; an early formative memory finds his mother warning “fighting is never justified”; its hero remains haunted by flashes of future wartime horrors; and, as bookend, it ends with a vision of war as twisted cities of flaming aircraft wreckage.

But The Wind Rises deliberately inhabits an uneasy moral middle-ground; in which Miyazaki refuses to push the narrative to its logical conclusion. It may openly criticise Japan's role in World War II, but the film is no apology, its hero never punished for the blood on his hands. The engineers therein, be they at work or in dreams, all refute the notion that they are mercenaries; their dream solely to “make beautiful planes,” their job to fulfil whatever contracts Mitsubishi has on the books. The Wind Rises knows this is a romantic delusion - no act of creation takes place in a vacuum - and shows it as a coping-mechanism for life under a strict regime; an evil empire turning even honest, honourable citizens into deplorable collaborators.

As well as its fascination with contraption, flight, and allegory, The Wind Rises shares another Miyazaki hallmark: amidst the high-fantasy and cutesy machinery, there's a matinée love-story. Usually, his paramours are mystically-entwined early-adolescents, but here he tenderly depicts a far more tragic kind of romance. With the wind alive as a tool of fate, its star-cross'd lovers meet-cute amidst horror and suffering: drawn together, first, in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, then reunited, years later, when Horikoshi's great love is already deep into a terminal case of tuberculosis; death a bedfellow in the sweetly-domestic relationship that Miyazaki grants them. In both love and work, Horikoshi hopes to carve out moments of beauty, humanity, and inspiration amidst a landscape littered with suffering; to dare to dream of health and hope in a time of inexorable loss. As a final film for Miyazaki, it's one of his darkest, most realist visions. His twin masterworks, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, placed their trust in the ineffable, opening up fantasy worlds in which anything seemed possible; The Wind Rises, in contrast, is a  film in which mortality hangs heavy, a sad lament for the very limits of dreams.

A camel photo-bomb would be so good right about now.

TRACKS

“I just wanna be by myself,” Mia Wasikowska says with a shrug; her 3000km death-march across the Australian desert motivated by mystical misanthropy. Wasikowska's waifish wanderer seeks solitude - even when at a '70s psychedelic be-in, she hears forlorn, Nymanesque piano-figures in her head - and prefers the company of beasts; thus, she takes a caravan of camels and her beloved dog out into the wilderness, concerned bogans (“you must be mad, girlie!”) and fretting family be damned. Marion Nelson's screenplay turns the trek into both a spiritual pilgrimage - her journey to the heart of a stolen continent a kind martyred apologia; this blonde adventuress the antithesis to a nation of culturally-insensitive tourists - and a journey into the past; Wasikowska haunted by the obligatory flashbacks-that-build-towards-a-big-reveal. John Curran happily casts his camera at the wide-screen wonder of the endless horizon, the film both playing up to and undermining notions of the mythical outback, Australian cinema's eternal film-set. Ever since Robyn Davison made the real-life expedition in 1977, folk've been trying to bring her human-survival tale to screen. But removed from its era, Tracks becomes a symbolic fantasy for the digital era: with Adam Driver photographing everything like some annoying Instagrammer, and the proto-bloggers of the press wanting to reduce Wasikowska to a human meme - Camel Lady - it's a parable about the difficulties of actually getting off the grid.

Castaway 2 starring Robert Redford? We'd see that...

ALL IS LOST

Beyond the floating-camera beauty of its galaxial gymnastics, Gravity's great failing was the generic nature of the narrative, which burdened Sandy Bullock's space-dame with a perfunctory back-story of cheap emotional manipulation. There was no need for such gerrymandering of audience affections: crowds're always going to cheer for the person vs the void, nature's endless vastness a landscape that surely will summon our shared humanity. JC Chandor - the Cuarónian figure behind All Is Lost - understands this. As Chandor makes movie-makin' magic in the Titanic tank, Robert Redford's solo-sailor-adrift-at-sea doesn't wax lyrical re: some dead-daughter canard. Instead, Bobby Sundance gets down to the business of surviving, remaining mum as his boat springs a leak, loses its communications equipment, and slowly turns into a floating tomb. There's effectively no dialogue, Chandor revelling in the glories of silence after his debut, Margin Call, featured famous actors spouting non-stop high-finance jargon. Rather than explicitly spelling-out back-story, Chandor writes history in the lines on Redford's face. In an opening voice-over - an in-medias-res flash-forward from at his lowest ebb, a man breaking down on the doorstep of the abyss - All Is Lost's leading man conveys a vague disappointment in his life, offers an open-ended, all-purpose apology for having not just been a better man. It feels like a cipher, through which viewers can tally their own disappointments, guess at what would eat away at them when eyeball-to-eyeball with their own mortality. But keeping things uncluttered and implied preserves the sanctity of the parable; Chandor inhabiting the existential that Cuarón felt the need to flee from.