Devils on the Doorstep (2000, Jiang Wen) (Patreon)

84/100

Third viewing, last seen 2002. Just assumed that I'd reviewed it back then and would be doing my standard cut/paste with a few additional comments, but it turns out that I wrote nothing at all, either professionally or on my site. Didn't even post anything much on the nerd group, which was going strong at the time. Had I known that I'd have taken notes. Best I can do now is direct your attention to this Scenic Routes column from 11 years ago, which addresses the film's singular mordant-antic tone and more or less applies to the rest of the film as well (though the stomach-churning, Come and See-level atrocity-fest I'd braced myself for, based on hastily skimmed Cannes reports from nearly two years earlier, does eventually arrive). I didn't revisit the entire movie to write that piece, however—merely watched the scene in question a bunch of times—and so marveled anew last week that Jiang sustains his bracing amalgam of bleak, hilarious and gorgeous for two solid hours, continually inventing new and more ludicrous complications even as the Japanese military's daily procession, with the band playing literally the only song it knows, creates a hopeless feeling of eternal recurrence. Also, while I have no record of my 2002 Skandies vote, I'm almost certain that Teriyuki Kagawa (who'd later play what's essentially the title role in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Creepy) was one of my top Supporting Actor picks that year; the only thing funnier than Hanaya's incandescent rage in the film's first half is the dime-turn he makes to abject groveling once death no longer seems abstractly honorable. Ends perfectly, too, with a grimly satisfied flourish that's been carefully set up...except you don't register it as foreshadowing, because it's immediately followed by the absurd sight, shot from exactly the right comic distance, of two ostensibly beheaded men hopping frantically around in burlap sacks. Jiang's subsequent films have been a letdown, but at least he played his part in the greatest Cannes Competition slate of the past 20 years.