Toad Saves Tokyo is the funniest of the six seismic short stories written by Haruki Murakami under the influence of the earthquake that devastated Kobe in 1995. The composer and painter Pierre Földes was inspired by it, as well as by some other texts by the Japanese novelist, to Blind willows, sleeping woman, a visually superb film if you can press “pause”, but whose human faces and bodies suffer from ugly animation. The different texts, entangled with an overly ostensible desire to make them say things, lose much of the mystery that made them so charming. Luckily, there’s Crapaudin (renamed Frog) – and the expressive freedom his big, giant frog head allows has something to do with it – to inject some electricity into this long, soft object. M. K.
Blind willows, sleeping woman but Pierre Földes, 1h49.
The caftan of the title, we will hear regarding it, and rather twice than once: throughout her film, Maryam Touzani stages the artisanal manufacture of a large blue caftan (long Middle Eastern tunic) that Halim is weaving in his shop in the medina of Salé. In the back room, he is busy, helped by his new apprentice Youssef, while Mina tries to put on a good face in front of the customers, plagued by the resurgence of her cancer. Like this shot of a sewing hand that keeps coming back, always the same, the film suffers from the poverty of its staging, made up of repetitive close-ups of the ever more contrite faces of its characters. Because while Mina is wasting away, Halim and Youssef develop on their side a clandestine love (barely filmed) that the film considers only in its relationship with Mina’s illness: Halim feels guiltier every day, Mina weaker. Obsessed with an emotion that should only be found in the shot-reverse shot, thus limiting any possibility of going beyond an agreed scenario, the film offers an outcome bordering on bad taste: this long-woven caftan will be reconvened for the umpteenth time to seal the fate of this improbable love triangle in pathos. L.T.
