Hayao Miyazaki’s last film is also his most experimental
It is said (or According to Godard, same thing), Luis Bunuel's late work is done as freely as late-style Beethoven played piano. It comes to mind a quote from Mozart, if I'm not being stupidly mistaken, that the lightness he approached as he advanced towards his final works was exactly why it was impressive, to achieve a sublime weightlessness with a mastery and clearness of vision that only comes with maturity. To a director, the dream would be to drive towards the Absolute, that is, to become a technician like Hitchcock, which is impossible so just an artist who can still kill with precision, and then die. That is the case of Oliveira's O Estranho Caso de Angélica, Dreyer's Gertrud or Bresson's L'Argent.
And so it would've been true to Miyazaki if The Wind Rises had been his last film as promised. That film being a complete bouleversement of all of his most known tendencies, for better and worse, it turns out to be his first film about reality with the touch of grace we can only find in Miyazaki's dreams. On the contrary, towards the end of his career we find him treading down a road very similar to Kiarostami's, or Godard's. That isn't to say formally, which would be blasphemous, but rather in the plane of a similar emotional phase of the dying artist, or aging artist, call it what you want. An artist's last work is always important, but to Miyazaki, it is not his most fundamental, nor his lightest, and not even his most conservatory. His last film is the beginning of his career.
To me, his highest point up until now had been Ponyo, for the exact same reason Princess Mononoke had been not his lowest, but one of his weakest specially because of the impetuous force it has and that Miyazaki's films can do better without. So I thought. But, as I was saying, Ponyo had been his best exactly because of its simplicity and leisure, as we watch Van Gogh and Auguste Renoir in movement, more than they already were when framed and still.
That was, until The Boy and the Heron. Don't get me wrong, traditionally speaking, Ponyo is by far his best and most harmonious, the one with the most control over his skill, and to match the film's theme, a killer balance. His abilities of creation and expansion of new worlds is counterbalanced by the children's limit of perception.
On the other hand, The Boy and the Heron is his most experimental film. His darkest and slowest picture, eventually not coming together and almost tearing apart right until the last moments. Imagination here has a fluid-like quality we don't find in his other work. Everything is shaky, chaotic, falling apart like bricks, or even more, this film is structured like dominoes. Identities and places are momentary, different timelines coexist and contradict each other. Leaps are possible, so is arriving somewhere new, uncharted and following straight ahead until the next, unexpected place to land. Is there even an ahead, or is it just free fall. Even still, the free fall only begins halfway through, or more than halfway through. However, its virtual incoherence is contained to foment a sense of things just being slightly off, or on the tension of breaking. It's very peculiar and strange. This film is a flux of energy bursting into so many concepts and mirrors, back and forth, with a nauseating palette of suffering and confusion, until it all clicks. The film creates and breaks its own rules, to build a towering, indefinable world on collapse.
And then we realize everything this arrives to, and how the film deceived us with an illusion that was nothing but the crux of human existence. Literally. To accept not only death, but Life, and burn yourself for love.
