I recently filled in a blind spot by finally watching Adaptation., in which Charlie Kaufman’s self-loathing caricature of himself asks a screenwriting guru played by Brian Cox for advice on how to write a script “where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved.” Cox’s character is enraged by the question, and goes on a diatribe about how life is full of conflict and drama, and that leaving those elements out of a movie is a waste of the audience’s precious time.

I thought of Cox sputtering and gesturing while assembling the films for this month’s column, several of which blend scenes “where nothing much happens,” as Cage/Kaufman puts it in Adaptation., with wrenching emotional intensity and life-altering tragedy. La Haine hangs around with its characters for an eventful, yet idle 24 hours. Love Hotel wrings aching melodrama out of imive long takes. High Art plummets into the void so subtly, we don’t know we’re falling until it’s too late.

It’s not a perfect comparison—speaking of falling, Drop Zone is a movie where a lot happens—but it is an instructive one. Perhaps the essence of life is in the flow between these states, something and nothing merging into a continuous stream of experiences. Sometimes movies are a way to escape life, and sometimes they’re a reflection of it; both are new for you in Shelf Life this month.

La Haine

4K UHD available April 21 from the BFI.

Love Hotel

4K restoration from Cinema Guild in theaters now at Metrograph, expansion to follow.

It takes a special kind of cinephile to appreciate a feel-bad masterpiece like Shinji Somai’s Love Hotel. The film is ostensibly an erotic drama, produced by Japan’s Nikkatsu Studios towards the end of its “Roman Porno” series. A subset of “pink” filmmaking—broadly, Japanese films of any genre built around sex and nudity—“Roman Pornos” were marketed as classy, yet naughty affairs, movies that delivered the softcore goods but that you wouldn’t be totally humiliated watching in public. Aside from the requirement of a nude scene every ten minutes, filmmakers were given artistic freedom on these projects; for Somai, that meant hard-hitting explorations of the after-effects of trauma, filmed in Chantal Akerman-esque long takes. And a lot of nudity.

Somai’s use of the long-take style in Love Hotel is exquisite. Jack calls the approach “raw and emotionally cutting,” while Fred writes that Somai—who was actually better known for his coming-of-age films—“weave[s] the erotic and dramatic into single sustained sequences, capturing a multitude of the characters' emotions while doing so.” The camera molds bare limbs into sculptural shapes, using mirrors to reflect the characters’ twisted physical and mental states back onto each other in cramped hotel rooms and shabby apartments.

There are scenes of sexual violence, but what’s most upsetting is the overall mood of alienation and despair. It’s a devastating portrait of two broken people desperately grasping at whatever connection they can find: Joshua calls it “a story about wanting to reclaim selfhood through others,” a theme that’s particularly devastating when applied to Nami (Noriko Hayami), the film’s female lead. Nami’s interactions with men have left her so traumatized that she doesn’t know how to express herself except through sex. What she really wants is to be cared for. But she pursues degradation instead, because that’s all she knows.

Somai’s sympathetic portrayal of Nami reminded me of Mikio Naruse, who also documented the struggles of women in postwar Japan with films like When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. It’s just that, in Somai’s case, they come embellished with city pop, neon and bondage. Love Hotel is a whalloper, and a must see for the type of person who likes movies that leave them emotionally drained. A new 4K restoration debuts at the Metrograph theater in New York this month, with an expansion to follow.

High Art

4K restoration in theaters now at IFC Center, expansion to follow.

To be fair, one could argue that it’s not being gay that kills Ally Sheedy’s character in this angsty romance. It’s heroin. (Then, as now, that stuff’ll kill you.) Much of High Art’s morose, tortured appeal comes from hanging out with the morose, tortured characters in ’90s bohemian New York, which Lexi helpfully explains is different from contemporary bohemian New York “in that everyone smokes constantly and freelancers can afford to live in Williamsburg.” Personally, I wanted to sit next to Patricia Clarkson, playing a washed-up German actress named Greta who’s always named-dropping Fassbinder even though he died fifteen years before the film begins. (Lots of Letterboxd feel that way, actually.)

Lisa Cholodenko’s film is very cynical about the art world, as its lead character learns that for all the lip service, artists like Sheedy’s Lucy Berliner—based on All the Beauty and the Bloodshed subject Nan Goldin—are mere grease for the art-world machine. It’s an all-around bummer, and the druggy malaise combined with that ending turns off some Letterboxd . Autostraddle’s (and Letterboxd Journal contributor) Drew Burnet Gregory is a defender, however, writing: “People talk about High Art like it’s this horny relic of the ’90s but I think it’s a masterpiece that should be talked about as much as (and in conversation with) Carol.” Judge for yourself when a new 4K restoration begins its theatrical tour this month—launching, appropriately enough, at the IFC Center in New York.

Drop Zone

4K UHD available from Cinématographe.

The Outlaw Josey Wales / Pale Rider

4K UHDs available April 15 from Warner Bros.

Now in his nineties, Clint Eastwood is a revered elder statesman of cinema. But there was a time when he was an iconoclast, the mute harbinger of a new era in Western film. His early directorial efforts in the genre see Eastwood working out what a hero meant to his generation, who grew up watching white hats and black hats on TV but whose dissatisfaction with the status quo led to the creation of the ’60s counterculture. Eastwood’s loners share the values of the John Wayne cowboy, defending the weak and challenging tyranny whenever necessary. But they’re more skeptical of authority—the guys in charge are rarely the good guys, and the real heroes have a price on their head.

The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider (pictured above) epitomize this emerging ethos, which is convenient as both are making the leap to 4K UHD in April, along with the star’s iconic role in Dirty Harry. The influence of Eastwood’s work with spaghetti Western maestro Sergio Leone can be felt in both films, but with a more humanistic, character-based focus. As ScreeningNotes explains, “the central thesis of the revisionist western is that… the supposedly benevolent civilizing influence saving North America from the savagery of the western frontier was itself just as savage, if not more so.”

Eastwood’s heroes—a disillusioned ex-Confederate in Josey Wales, an enigmatic “Preacher” in Pale Rider—stand in opposition to this system, as his “Man With No Name” did in Leone’s Dollars trilogy. The difference is that these later films turn the lone gunslinger into a guardian angel for “people living at the margins of society,” as Diogo writes, leading them into “the birth of a community that resists everything by affirming life.” This collectivist message seems at odds with Eastwood’s self-proclaimed “libertarianism, which has since morphed into conservatism,” as Jerry notes. Eastwood—and his films—is elusive in that way, which is one of the most American things about him.