Mubi Presents: The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine

Decades before Title IX and the Netflix short doc Little Miss Sumo, women’s sumo wrestling was a popular attraction in Japan. Evidently, many rural spectators flocked to bouts in the mistaken hope the wrestlers would grapple topless. These weathered peasants were exactly the sort of lumpen proletariat the anarcho-socialist Guillotine Society hoped to radicalize, so they too start attending the tournaments staged by Tamasaburo Iwaki’s touring wrestling stable. They will stir up considerably more love, lust, and tragedy than revolutions and consciousness-raising in Takahisa Zeze’s The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine, which screens tomorrow as part of the Mubi Presents series at the Spectacle Theater.

The Imperial regime cynically capitalized on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 to crackdown on revolutionary elements. That included assassinating the charismatic leader of the Guillotine Society, as well as his wife, a feminist professor, and their six-year-old nephew. As the new de facto leader of the underground organization, Tetsu Nakahama burns for revenge. However, the unpublished poet and self-styled Valentino is not a formidable man of action. When one reprisal attempt goes horribly wrong, Nakahama and the achingly conscientious Daijiro Furuta retreat to the countryside to lay low and raise funds for a further attempt.

One day, they attend some matches held by Iwaki’s wrestlers. Nakahama is immediately struck by Tamae Tokachigawa, a former prostitute, who survived a massacre of ethnic Koreans instigated by a clique of local veterans turned vigilantes. At the same time, Furuta is quite struck by the younger and more naïve Tomoyo Hanakiku (or “Kiku” for Chrysanthemum), who joined the stable after fleeing her abusive husband.

Suddenly, Nakahama and Furuta largely lose interest in politics, especially the former. Unfortunately, they will get dragged back in again when the vigilantes try to flush out the Guillotines by targeting the wrestlers. They are a sad, clumsy lot. Sort of like Clouseau, they suspect everybody and everything, but their methods are brutal and their hunches are not wrong.

So, this film is three hours and nine minutes long. It is good, but that is still a tad bit excessive. In fact, the first two hours set in 1924 are considerably more engaging and engrossing than the subsequent hour set several years later. Arguably, it might have been more effective as an epilogue than a full third act.

Nevertheless, the cast is excellent and Zeze sustains an impressive vibe of wistful romanticism during the respite from the grubby business of revolt. Some ambitious programmer should consider pairing it with Radford’s Il Postino.

Incentivize Me: Freakonomics

So this is what passes for iconoclasm in the age of hope and change? Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner scandalized millions with their mega-bestselling Freakonomics. In a nutshell, they argue correlation is often confused with causation, incentives matter, but people are often motivated by unforeseen factors, yet they are often willing to cheat for a valuable reward. What can you say about that, except maybe: “duh.” However, their flair for colorful illustrations sold millions of books and has now inspired Freakonomics (trailer here), an anthology documentary opening tomorrow in New York.

Featuring four separate short docs adapted or inspired by the book, Freakonomics the film is held together by author segments directed by Seth Gordon, who seems to understand the material far better than the other participating filmmakers. In addition to Levitt and Dubner’s kvetching, Gordon illustrates one of the most topical Freakonomics case-studies, an incident in which Chicago public school teachers were caught cheating. To protect their own interests, they were filling in the correct answers on students’ unfinished standardized tests, suspiciously starting from the bottom with the hardest questions of the exam.

Likewise, education is the also the topic of Freakonomics’ best (and final) constituent sub-film. Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady’s self-explanatory Can a Ninth Grader Be Bribed to Succeed? follows a pilot program advised by Levitt that dispensed small cash payments to underperforming students who sufficiently improved their marks each quarter. The results were okay, but not overwhelming because of the myriad of competing incentives for teenagers.

By contrast, Alex Gibney’s Pure Corruption is easily the worst segment of the film. Gibney and the Freakonomists assume the mere idea of cheating in the sport of sumo will be shocking in and of itself. However, after MLB’s steroid scandals and the open secret of American wrestling’s scripted nature, most viewers will simply shrug at such revelations.

That is not to say an interesting film could not be made about sumo corruption, but Gibney himself seems bored by the topic. As a result, he frequently tosses in non-sequitur references to Wall Street indiscretions and American conduct in the War on Terror. He would be perfectly within his rights to do so in his own film (as debatable as such stretches might be), but Freakonomics carries the imprimatur of Levitt and Dubner, who honestly seem to make a good faith effort to resist partisanship in their own work. Gibney does them a disservice and does not do any favors for audiences either, dashing off a murky film that visually resembles an early 1990’s episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

Like Gibney, Morgan Spurlock does not seem to have much of a handle on the Freakonomics methodology either in A Roshanda By Any Other Name, which asks the question whether children’s names can determine whether they will be successful later. The answer seems to be it can’t, except when it does, but really not. Various sociological studies are cited, but they leave us asking more questions. In one experiment, it was determined resumes with bland white-bread names were more likely to get a response from prospective employers than those with what were assumed to be African-American names. However, it would be interesting to compare the presumed African-American call back rate to that for white trashy names like Billy Bob Bakersfield, but Spurlock never delves into any such crosstabs.

Though still a mixed bag, Eugene Jarecki’s It’s Not Always a Wonderful Life is more successful tackling one of the most challenging arguments of Freakonomics: that the precipitous drop in crime during the mid to late 1990’s was directly attributable to Roe v. Wade. Like Levitt & Dubner, Jarecki is careful not to explicitly advocate anything. However, in framing the debate, he seems to take great pleasure in denying credit to Mayor Giuliani’s proactive policing policies, while speedily glossing over the insignificance of gun control. (Again, showing his partisan colors would be fine in his own film, but in a very real sense, Jarecki is representing Levitt & Dubner here). It is provocative argument that raises a host of ethical questions everyone basically punts away. Still, the stylized animation is effective and Melvin Van Peebles adds some serious coolness as the narrator.

Levitt and Dubner did not invent incentives. They have always been a fact of life and they have always mattered. In fact, Freakonomics-style analysis has been around for decades. Economist James Buchanan argued the self-interest of politicians and bureaucrats should always be taken into account when analyzing government regulation. Of course, his Public Choice Theory of economics did not spawn a New York Times bestseller—just a Nobel Prize. Still, Levitt and Dubner are bright and engaging speakers, which Gordon conveys fairly well. The rest of the film though, is just all over the place. It opens this Friday (10/1) in New York at the Angelika.