To the Ends of the Earth.

I occasionally post about a movie that prominently features language, and today’s installment is To the Ends of the Earth. Criterion Channel is currently featuring a dozen Kiyoshi Kurosawa films, and having worked my way up to 2019 I gave this one a try. (My favorite is still his first big hit, 1997’s Cure, but I like his style so much I don’t mind watching even the less successful ones.) It’s about a reporter for a Japanese travel program who visits Uzbekistan with her crew and has various experiences, alternately annoying (go back up in the scary and doubtless unsafe amusement ride so we can get another B-roll take!) and frightening (getting lost and wandering in dark alleys in an unknown city); the Hattically interesting part is that she (obviously) doesn’t speak any Uzbek and the locals (equally obviously) don’t speak any Japanese, except for one translator/fixer who fell in love with Japan and its culture so much that he learned the language fluently, so there’s a lot of onscreen…