I got a chance to preview two foreign films that will make very brief Bay Area appearances next week. If you don’t catch them now, you may never get another chance.
A- Sawako Decides, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Thursday, January 13, 7:30; Sunday, January 16, 1:00. How do you manage in a highly competitive world—one where you compete not only for money and power but also love–when you know that you’re hopelessly mediocre. That’s the question writer/director Yuya Ishii asks in this strange, ironically funny drama. 
(The YBCA is calling Sawako Decides a comedy; I’m not so sure I agree.) Over the course of five years in Tokyo, Sawako has had five jobs and five boyfriends, and her current ones are not improvements. She drinks too much and thinks little of herself. But with her father dying, she returns to her home town–current boyfriend and his young daughter in tow–to take over his small business. The last act gets a bit slow (this would have made a better film if it had been 15 minutes shorter) and at one point comes dangerously close to a Hollywood ending. But overall, it’s a sad, funny, quirky, and ultimately moving tale of people who will never be winners, but may be able to scratch a modicum of happiness out of their lives.
Sawako Decides is one of two films in the YBCA series Lost In Japan: The Existential Comedies of Yuya Ishii.
B Mahler On the Couch, Castro, Friday, January 14, 7:00. Gustav Mahler visited Sigmund Freud in 1910, hoping for help in handling his wife’s infidelity. One hundred years later, Felix and Percy Adlon used this piece of historical trivia as a framing device for a film about Mahler’s marriage to the former Alma Schindler (and future Alma Gropius and Alma Werfel). The framing device isn’t particularly original or clever. Nor do the Adlons stick rigorously to its implied 
restrictions. If we’re watching what are supposed to be Gustav’s psychoanalysis-inspired flashbacks, why are they narrated by secondary characters (such as his sister and Alma’s mother), speaking directly to the camera? If you ignore the Freud scenes, you get a very good drama about a famously troubled marriage, held together by one brilliant performance–Barbara Romaner as Alma. She’s joyous, energetic, brimming with life, and sexy as hell. But when difficult times come (and they do), she rages with a dark pain from the deep wells of her generally happy soul. This performance alone makes Mahler On the Couch worth seeing. But even Romaner can’t make us understand why this beautiful, vivacious young woman would fall for a stiff, seemingly passionless man almost twice her age, who expects her to give up her own ambitions for his.
Mahler On the Couch opens the three-day German Gems film festival.
Bayflicks 