I had already been starting to see some films at the Pacific Film Archive before I moved to Berkeley, but the breakup was the clincher. Now it's so easy to pop over and take in whatever they happen to be showing, whether it's a Fritz Lang silent or trash cinema from the 60s. They have copies of films you would never see anywhere else, movies so beautiful you can't believe how few people will ever even know they exist.

PFA just wrapped up its neo-eiga series of new Japanese cinema. The range of films within the series was impressive, the common thread being that most of them have not been widely screened outside of the film festival circuit. I saw three films and loved each one of them.

Rendan: Quartet for Two, the opening film of the festival, was my version of a perfect movie. It took a domestic drama and explored the facets of its characters with such warmth and humor that you find yourself laughing and horrified at what fools we mortals be all at the same time. If you've seen Shall We Dance?, you will absolutely recognize Naoto Takenaka; here he plays a full-time househusband who has just discovered his beloved wife is having an affair. Family chaos ensues as husband and wife battle and daughter and son try to make sense of it all. Takenaka also directed the film, and he relishes the weirdnesses and poignancy of human nature.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Seance, by contrast, was a rewriting of the typical Japanese ghost story. Decidedly scary in the good old-fashioned sense (I had my hands over my eyes quite a bit), Kurosawa also sees as much horror in the boredom of middle-class marriage as in ghosts and doppelgangers. He borrows a motif or two from The Sixth Sense (which I finally saw this weekend), but Seance is really its own unsettling thing.

Disturbing in a completely different way, Tomoyuki Furumaya's Bad Company tells the story of teenage Sadatomo, his group of friends, and their sadistic teacher Kobayashi. Sadatomo and his classmates struggle between conformity and rebellion at the same time that they deal with all the crap that comes with being a teenager. Filmed in rural Japan, this film had many moments that stayed with me long after I left the theater.

This is the second year the PFA presented neo-eiga, and I hope it returns for an even longer run next year. I also find myself wishing they allowed food and drink inside the theater, but I think that's just because I spend so much time at the Parkway.

Art + Film