Kinetic and balletic. Bullets and buckshot fly. Hit bodies. Blood and body-parts splatter the sets. People drop to the floor amidst blood and gore. By people, I mean young females. A high-school girl named Mitsuko (Reina Triendl) is our first protag. Pretty much stunned and helpless, she flees scenes of carnage every few minutes. She runs the same gauntlet ad infinitum: a scene is established, a feeling of grue overcomes her and gratuitous violence erupts. As she escapes she dodges a number of antagonists: a supernatural scythe-like wind that decapitates busloads of schoolgirls and dismembers random passers-by at first, and then she flees a massacre orchestrated by teachers carrying military-grade weapons that cause ridiculous damage. Over the course of her escape, she transforms into… a bride named Keiko (Mariko Shinoda) who has a wedding from hell as it devolves into a mass brawl full of kung-fu kicking and jagged glass bottles for people to get stuck with. And then she turns into a marathon runner named Izumi (Erina Mano) who has to sprint away from danger. These ladies have all become involved in a fatal game of “tag” where they narrowly avoid death with every step. But can they break the cycle by making it to the end and what is awaiting them at the finishing line?
Sion Sono does a Seijun Suzuki and takes what could be humdrum source material and transforms it into something else. The source is Yusuke Yamada’s 2001 novel, Real Onigokko, originally a story about people with the same last name being bumped off by be-suited foes. Already subject to a series of films, Sono turns the source into a bit of a feminist parable about a woman’s options being limited by male-dominated society. Well, Sono isn’t quite on the level of Suzuki in, say, Branded to Kill or Tokyo Drifter here because this lacks the visual vibrancy of the legend’s best works despite the non-stop action in this gory exploitation title with a ridiculous body-count.
The film is, without a doubt, violent. Quite surreal at times, as well. Andre Breton would be proud, for a line in his second manifesto of Surrealism states:
“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”
Which is pretty much what happens here. Although brutal and surreal, the film doesn’t work itself up into a fervid childish, savage fever-dream full of irrationality which it could. Despite the high action quotient, the film is subject to quiet moments that allow the audience to breathe and wonder just where the narrative is going and characters talk to each other and drop clues as to what could be happening. Mitsuko’s best friend Aki (Yuki Sakurai) draws her away from school and the wedding and insists on her being independent while the spunky and cool Sur (Ami Tomite), short for surreal, exhorts her to stay strong because, “Life is surreal. Don’t let it consume you”. We’re very much aware that the only characters are women and they are being mutilated and it becomes a sickening spectacle. An angst settles in as we suss out some underlying meaning is rearing its head and then the ending puts what is a nightmarish situation into some even more horrifying perspective and offers some logic to ground things.
Sono’s “feminist” streak and his commitment to critiquing patriarchy surfaces and, much like Antiporno (2016), it turns the film into a self-reflexive look at the world of entertainment. The sobering thing is that it offers an utterly bitter ending that should shock audiences since it is predicated on the existential truth that we always have freedom – even if we are imprisoned or enslaved, we still have choices we can go make: to go along with things, resist or commit suicide. And this leads to a stunning ending as Mitsuko, a lamb amidst the slaughter, finally learns to roar like a lion and seize her freedom.
If I have any criticism, it’s that the film doesn’t quite nail the correct tone. I feel like a hyped up, knowing atmosphere a la Exte (2007) or the colourful randomness of Survive Style 5+ (2004) would have suited the scenario more. The film is full of solid special-effects and prop work, courtesy of veteran director and effects-man Yoshihiro Nishimura (Tokyo Gore Police, Helldriver) who ensures the bloodbath is bloody enough but the comedic violence levels should have been Loony Tunes to work really effectively especially considering the final reveal. That written, there is enough anarchic humour to make things entertaining. All of the performances are good to great and the film does have an effect that will make audiences think a lot.
For a film that is an entry in a popular “death-game” franchise where throwaway characters are the norm, this achieves something profound. Overall, considering this was one of four films directed by Sono to be released in 2015, it’s pretty good (although not as good as Love and Peace). There is enough of an anarchic sense of humour and gratuitous action to make sure it never gets too tiring and also some beautiful images such as the final one where Mitsuko continues to run, an overhead shot from a drone watching her disappear into a white landscape as music by the group Mono plays. Just stunning.
This is directed by Sion Sono one of the world’s great contemporary directors who built a career on existential drama/horror like Suicide Circle, Strange Circus, and Noriko’s Dinner Table. 2015 saw the release of six of his films, three of which were froma franchise including this one. This is based on a TV dorama that is based on a manga written by Kiminori Wakasugi, creator of the hilarious Detroit Metal City. After a first viewing I was tempted to write it off as an insincere cash-in on a smutty comic book and Tenga sex toys but I will be generous and say that the film is an unashamed celebration of raging hormones and naive love (as well as Tenga sex toys) wrapped up in a knowingly stupid story.
We’re not watching Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, we’re watching the misadventures of Yoshiro “Yocchan” Kamogawa (Shota Sometani), ordinary (virgin) high school boy in Toyohashi. It is a city with more good-looking women than anywhere else in the world, apparently, but he can’t get laid because he’s a bit of a nerd. He finds his life literally changes overnight when he wakes up with the ability to read other people’s minds. Sounds awesome! But he cannot use it effectively since he is caught up in an obsession with the idea that a classmate named Sae (Erina Mano) is his destined girl. He has a dream that they formed a mental connection while their mothers sat next to each other in the hospital when they were both still in the womb. Destiny does seem to have a hand in their meeting because she is the daughter of a travelling scientist (Ken Yasuda) who is in town to discover psychics!
Indeed, Yoshiro’s not alone in gaining weird powers as a perverted café owner named Teru-oichan (Makita Sports) has developed telekinetic powers and can move any object or person that is sexual. Sounds really awesome! But he uses his power for his beloved Tenga and porno mags. Yosuke Enomoto (Fukami), a school basketball player, gains the power to teleport. Sounds super-awesome! But it only works while he is naked. Then there is Yoshiro’s kick-ass cutie of a classmate Miyuki (Elaiza Ikeda) who also has the ability to read minds. It is a shame that they cannot read each other’s minds because if they could, Yoshiro would discover that Miyuki is crushing on him super hard. Not that telepathy or anything is needed since they quarrel like a married couple!
When an evil psychic starts making the women around town horny and perverted, the espers find themselves press-ganged into joining a team to battle for love and slightly less perversion (only slightly less) to save the day. Get ready to see how they use their powers against rival espers!
Beautiful busty babes in bikinis with bouncy bountiful breasts and behinds do battle on the big screen in Sion Sono’s bawdy adaptation of Kiminori Wakasugi’s manga Minna Espa Da Yo!. Forgive the lewdness of the last sentence. Despite the acres of flesh, this is a cheeky romp more in tune with Britain’s Carry On films of the 70’s than the vulgarity of the American Pie series and it is actually shot through with a small degree innocence in its belief in love. It resembles the imagination of a naive teenage boy raised on manga.
The characters display an anthology of psychic-sexual kinks like teleportation exhibitionism and erotic object psychokinesis which are mined for laughs as they hope to further their lusty adventures. Of course, when the big showdown to display everything comes, they get performance anxiety for this film is more the softest of softcore and pretty un-erotic as, despite the masses of scantily clad people of Toyohashi (and the AV actresses bussed in) nobody gets it on and everyone is more concerned with being cheeky.
When thinking about this film and its potential for porn the adjectives for the final result that come to mind are antonyms of what are expected – sexy becomes cute, raunchy becomes chaste, explicit becomes implied. The humour is goofy enough to be amusing as everyone mugs for the camera but the bits that made me laugh most were Ken Yasuda’s as he deadpans his way through the sexy shenanigans as the psychic squad’s leader, keeping a straight face amidst so much bare flesh and a little cross-dressing.
What stuck out the most amidst the competing comedy and ribaldry was a sense of yearning for pure love and this acts as a dramatic backbone for the story. I’m going to go against my better judgement here and say that there is something substantive to this movie as a send-up of adolescent conceptions of love and lust although, despite concessions to female sexuality and perversions, this is just a retread of familiar gender relations and so it breaks no new ground.
Made in the same year as Shinjuku Swan (2015), Love & Peace (2015), Tag (2015) and The Whispering Star (2015), this is the worst of the bunch. Technically solid, story-wise, silly. The most interesting thing to consider about this film is that it led into the creation of Antipornoand Tag, two titles that critique gender roles, something writ large when you have experienced and talented actresses like Mariko Tsutsui (Harmonium) her role as a sexy housewife. Antiporno is, in hindsight, an incoherent roar of rage against the exploitation of women and inability to address sex in healthy terms in society while Tag is a fierce diatribe against the infantalisation of men by the media and the tacit acceptance of oppressive sexual roles. I suspect Sono was picking up a paycheck with Virgin Psychics so he could make more challenging films and he acknowledged the troubling aspects of gender roles seen in this film with Antiporno and Tag.
This week I reviewed two Sion Sono movies, Tagand Virgin Psychics, both from 2016 and while the former is more meaningful than the latter, both are worth watching.
Get past what we all know is inevitable and let’s make a start dealing with this stuff and making a change for the better in society.
This was originally written in 2018 for that year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival and BEFORE the current diplomatic crisis…
Japan and Korea don’t always have the best diplomatic relations but the recent Winter Olympics and a whole bunch of films see creatives and sportspeople unite. This film sees the two nations work together thanks to music as friendship sprouts between Korean directors and Japanese actors.
The original title when I saw it at the festival was あなたの宇宙は大丈夫ですか (Anata no uchuu wa daijoubudesuka) which is something like Is Your Universe Okay? The new title is now Ferris Wheel.
Shot in many neighbourhoods in Osaka and featuring Japanese and Korean artists such as Lucid Fall, Soul Cry, Kandu, Lee Jong-on, and Hero-Sway, the film looks to have a lively and lovely soundtrack and pleasant characters who are a joy to be around. This is an excellent example of how a film and a festival can unite two countries.
Synopsis:When his boss Dae-jung goes missing in a ship accident, the company sends Woo-jyu to Osaka to finish his business. On his last day in the city, Woo-ju chases someone who looks exactly like Dae-jung to Taisho, an area in Osaka. He ends up losing him, but the sound of a guitar draws Woo-jyu to a small bar, Pier 34. Its owner, Snou, somehow reminds him of Dae-jung, and listening to his music brings back memories. After passing out right there, Woo-jyu ends up missing his flight back to Korea. He quits his job on a whim and soon meets Haruna, who is learning how to play the guitar from Snou. Woo-jyu decides to stay at Pier 34 until he finds Dae-jung and so begins an unlikely vacation for him.
Bunbuku director Nanako Hirose follows her critically-acclaimed feature His Lost Name with a documentary on books! It was at the Busan International Film Festival.
Synopsis: Nanako Hirose spent three years (2015-18) following a world leading book designer named Nobuyoshi Kikuchi. He has been active for more than 40 years and has worked on more than 15,000 books. By following Kikuchi and the way he designs books by touching and understanding physical materials, the film looks at the manufacture and status of paper books in the digital age.
Synopsis: It is almost time for the summer holiday but the entire male student body of one class from a junior high school disappear early as they put into action a rebellion against adults. With the help of female students, they launch operations from their base in an abandoned factory in a protest against adults and their hypocrisy and corruption and their actions thrill society even as they cause chaos for the iniquitous status quo.
Synopsis: It is the era of the silent movies and benshi (narrators who appear live in the cinema) are in demand. Shuntaro lives in a small town and he has had dreams of becoming a benshi ever since he was a child and his dreams are about to come true just as (it gets better) he is also reunited with his first love. He is, however, tasked with pleasing tough crowds as well as doing the chores and he also gets involved in a police case where they are tracking thieves and political activists…
Synopsis: University student Yuzuru Hamura is a fan of mystery novels and a member of a mystery club led by Kyosuke Akechi. They get a real mystery to investigate when fellow student and real detective Hiruko Kenzaki joins and all three head to a summer camp called Shijinso pension, which is nestled deep in the mountains, and a murder takes place.
Tunguska Butterfly Saki and Mari’s Story
ツングースカ・バタフライ サキとマリの物語「Tsungu-suka Batafurai Saki to Mari no Monogatari」
Apparently, according to the trailer, this is Asami’s last film! Big shock since she has been a part of many genre films but she goes out with an action film designed to show off her skills.
Synopsis: Saki is not your normal 28-year-old since she is a professional thief but one crime in her past led to a death and she was punished. Since then, she has struggled to rejoin society due to her past. Saki meets a 10-year-old girl named Mari who she catches shoplifting. The older woman befriends the girl and Saki learns that Mari has been abandoned by her mother. As they grow closer together, Saki’s past catches up with her…
Yokai Watch Jam the Movie: Yo-Kai Academy Y – Can a Cat be a Hero?
映画 妖怪学園Y 猫はHEROになれるか「Eiga Yo-kai Watch Jam: Yo-kai Gakuen Y – Neko wa Hero ni Nareru ka」
Synopsis: Jinpei Jiba is a member of Y Academy’s ‘YSP Club’ where he and his friends investigate the many mysteries surrounding their school. One of the ways they do that is by transforming into ‘Yokai Heroes’. The mysteries they have to unravel range from the menacing all-powerful student council to an alien invasion…
Synopsis: Kei Shichiri of “Once Upon a Dream” fame has made a short film produced as part of a series of works set in Yokohama where a young lady discovers more about her hometown and some of the people in it as she tracks down a lost tie.
Synopsis: Kurumi is a high schooler who doesn’t have a father. She finds a Harley bike left behind by her late father and, with friends and people recruited by SNS, she tries to repair it.
Katasumi-tachi to Ikiru Kantoku Katabuchi Sunao
＜片隅＞たちと生きる 監督・片渕須直の仕事「Katasumi-tachi to Ikiru Kantoku Katabuchi Sunao」
Release Date: December 13th, 2019
Duration: 95 mins.
Director:Reo Yamada
Writer:N/A
Starring:Sunao Katabuchi, Non, Kana Hanazawa, Nanase Iwai,
Synopsis: This documentary shows the production of In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World, the extended version of the 2016 anime film. It features director Katabuchi as he does research for the film and also the addition of new scenes involving seiyuu like Kana Hanazawa and original lead actress, Non.
Moriyama Naotaro Ningen no Mori o Nukete
森山直太朗 人間の森をぬけて「Katasumi-tachi to Ikiru Kantoku Katabuchi Sunao」
American streaming services like Netflix have given a new lease of life to Japanese creatives who have access to greater financial muscle and creative freedom and a wider audience so that means the fetters of the traditional Japanese system are off for the visionaries and the sky is the limit. That Sion Sono, simultaneous enfant terrible and wunderkind of Japanese cinema, was tapped to make a movie for Netflix was exciting news especially after his heart attack this year. What he turns in is a long and ornate tale of murder that sometimes plays like a greatest-hits of his previous work but is delivered with such aplomb and dexterity as well as some special performances it remains entertaining.
Sono channels a rather horrific series of real-life murders into a film much like he did with Cold Fish but makes the most of the budget to craft a rather rambling and highly theatrical story split into chapters.
He kicks off this lurid tale with a news story of a serial killer stalking the suburbs of Tokyo before introducing us to a bunch of amateur filmmakers (a little like the heedless cinephile characters from Why Don’t You Play in Hell?) led by blonde-headed Jay (Young Dais of Twisted Justice). These guys exist in the scrub in the concrete forest of Tokyo and the shoots of their enthusiasm far outstrip the potential bloom of their talents but that enthusiasm is infectious and sweeps up a new member, the bespectacled Shin (Shinnosuke Mitsushima). He is a seemingly weedy guy from Toyokawa who is dazzled by big city Tokyo as well as the possibility of bagging babes, booze and banned substances.
The sex part might be the easiest thing to solve because Jay has a friend named Taeko (Kyoko Hinami), a punkish nymphomaniac with a scar over the tattooed word Romeo on her thigh, a terrible limp, blue-dyed hair and a bad attitude. One look at the nebbish Shin and she suggests her former high school friend Mitsuko (Eri Kamataki), the daughter of a rich family and a virtual hikikkomori with a severe case of arrested development. Her controlling parents keep her cossetted up in the hopes of marrying her off to a suitable man and so she surrounds herself with reminders of her years in an all-girl school where she took part in a sapphic adaptation of Romeo and Juliet directed by Taeko where she played the leading lady.
Cue flashbacks to 1985 told with a blue filter and dance sequences where Sono’s trademark of slathering classical music over everything is in effect as an idealised lesbian fantasy takes place and these lilies find the first blossoming of love with Mitsuko, in particular, deeply affected by her idealised and idolised Romeo. Things turn sour when they become sexual and the girls are soon dancing with death a la Suicide Club and this reveals the roots of Mitsuko’s trauma and these roots burst forth from the past to the surface in her present with visions of her Romeo, complete with feathery light bloom, as the girl continue to invade her life.
The above summary is packed full of detail that could be a film in itself and yet The Forest of Love fits both sets of characters and the backstory in the opening twenty minutes thanks to Sono’s ability to go into high gear with a script and editing style that careens between scenes and sequences before the appearance of the thread that will link everyone together: Joe Murata (Kippei Shiina).
Joe slithers his way into the narrative with the pretext of wanting to return a ¥50 coin he borrowed from Mitsuko years earlier. This tenuous lie, told with gusto and confidence, is the first of many for a man who claims to have graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and works on Wall Street and in Hollywood. However, Taeko knows him as a serial conman who has defrauded an army of women of the money. Then, Shin and Jay hit upon the notion that he might be the serial killer stalking Tokyo and that he would be a good subject for their film.
Sono teases he might be a charismatic serial killer from the moment we first see him in scenes shot at a grubby cafe with a sort of gothic set decoration that tinges the place with horror. This is just another one of the details thrown at the viewers and with so much going on it is easy to get lost in so many incidents so the audience can’t see the forest for the trees as Murata slowly takes over Mitsuko, and then Shin’s life by becoming a lover and a film producer respectively…
The film is a lot of fun as we see Murata’s madcap energy capture hearts and minds as he breaks all social conventions to make people feel special but he becomes a bit like a cult-like figure and his influencing others to do his dirty work becomes an increasingly act thing to witness.
The camera knows when to linger on actors and their expressions and their movements for the most powerful emotional effect as we see them fall under his sway, the joy on their faces of being treated so nicely and then we get a palpable sense of fear and disgust invading them over their increasingly violent actions as people start dying. Shin adapts best while Mitsuko finds herself buffeted around by various people’s emotions, especially those of Murata whose sadism knows no bounds.
It’s brutal to watch humans being brow-beaten and being so despicable to each other and it becomes truly horrific later in the film as the deaths and dismemberments are shown on screen. Soichi Umezawa of Vampire Clay fame provides the hideously gruesome special effects and makeup for all manner of corpses in what is probably Sono’s most bloody and shocking film since Exte. It’s gloriously OTT and will send a shiver of disgust through audiences.
By this point, the bifurcated structure of the story has become whole but the narrative still continues to jump back and forth between scenes and, through flashbacks, along the timeline to create a towering macabre story where hidden motivations are exposed like in Strange Circus. There is so much that the film feels overburdened and teeters over a chasm of the audience’s incredulity, but it manages to retain its grip on viewers thanks to the rapid pace everything is delivered in.
The punchiness of the editing and movement of the camera helps prevent it being boring and deliver so much as Sono and his cinematographer Shohei Tanikawa (Sono’s collaborator on Himizu, Love Exposure,Noriko’s Dinner Table and Guilty of Romance) have a propulsive style that ensures the film never sags, flitting between locations and characters to as they pile pieces of the narrative’s jigsaw-like structure on to the screen and then assemble things together. The story being told from so many perspectives and angles lessens the tension a little too much at times so this feels like a rambling tale but provides plenty of reason to watch the film multiple times and the ending has enough that will catch audiences off-guard thanks to the acting that there is high impact.
As with all of Sono’s work lately, the acting is pitched at shrill and everyone is particularly intense with each other so it is to the credit of the actors that they match the demands of the script to sell the roles no matter how outrageous things get.
Kippei Shiina, with his shark-like grin and predatory eyes, beams bravado and braggadocio where he unleashes his charisma to become an emotional whirlwind that bowls over, and later batters characters so he can get his way. His confidence is total and exudes from his costume and his very being from the moment he steps out of his red sports car in a white suit with his beaming smile. Another standout performance is Shinnosuke Mitsushima, who camped it up in Hanagatami, is totally chilling as he becomes Murata’s disciple and undergoes further “changes” while newbie actress Eri Kamataki does well to essay neurosis and emotional rag-doll for others.
It is long and it does test the patience at times (even for this Sono fan) but, like Murata, it spins a tale so outrageous, one is entertained and swept away and the ending sequence is one to be admired.
The Japan Foundation announced the details of their Touring Film Programme for 2020. The tour lasts from January 31st to March 29th and the theme that connects them all is “love”. The films look at the emotions of joy and despair and, presumably, there will be every other emotion in between as people seek happiness. According to the organisers, there are stories of “love, social inclusion, the resilience of humankind through times of hardship, and unconventional paths to achieving and maintaining joy”.
Here are the films:
A Banana? At This Time of Night?
こんな夜更けにバナナかよ 愛しき実話「Konna Yofuke ni Banana kayo: Kanashiki Jitsuwa」
This is based on a true story that took place in lead actor Yo Oizumi’s home town. He’s a good actor who does every-man and comic roles well. This one seems like a combination of the two as he takes on a person with muscular dystrophy who has a different sense of humour who just wants to be normal. Expect pathos after the laughter. He is partnered with two good actors, Yo Ouzymi (I Am a Hero), Haruma Miura (Tokyo Koen), Mitsuki Takahata (Japanese Girls Never Die), Makiko Watanabe (Love Exposure), Koichi Sato (Starfish Hotel) and Hanae Kan (Yamato California) provide an excellent cast.
Synopsis: Yasuaki Kano (Yo Oizumi) a man with muscular dystrophy. He has had it since the age of 12 but that doesn’t stop him trying to live life to the fullest including being mischievous in ways from an eccentric sense of humour to escaping the hospital. It’s totally in character for him to say he wants to eat a banana late at night.
He meets Hisashi Tanaka (Haruma Miura), a medical student doing volunteer work at his hospital. Hisashi kind of likes him but when Yasuaki develops a crush on Hisashi’s girlfriend Misaki Ando (Mitsuki Takahata) Hisashi finds himself in a bind..
Mugi Kadowaki is a fine leading lady with great performances in all manner of works like Hanagatami and Double Life. This one looks engaging especially as it takes in video game culture.
Synopsis: Masami Konuma (Mugi Kadowaki) has little human contact outside of her father Eisuke (Makita Sports) because she has not left her home in a number of years. She is a fully-fledged otaku with a passion for drawing and her father, so worried about her, uses this to get her a job debugging video games. It seems like a genius idea since it doesn’t require much interaction with other people but her drawings soon get her noticed in the company by her boss Ryotaro (Takahiro Miura) and soon she develops feelings for him.
Synopsis: Introvert Ryota (Yuto Nakajima) and extrovert Koharu (Yuko Araki) are both high school students whose unlikely romance begins after a game of rice bag jump. Their romance develops of seven years with meals being the setting for a lot of their important moments.
Synopsis: Takeo Goda (Ryohei Suzuki) is an ultramasculine guy who I best friends with Makoto Sunakawa (Kentaro Sakaguchi), a bishounen. Takeo is super popular with the guys because of his athletic abilities but the girls ignore him in favour of Makoto. That changes when Takeo saves high school girl Rinko Yamato (Mei Nagano) from a pervert on a train. Takeo falls in love with her but thinks Rinko likes Makoto. This changes when Rinko tracks Takeo down…
Synopsis: A TV producer has a wife and nine girlfriends. Sounds difficult to manage and it gets positively murderous when all ten, all of whom are fed up with his behaviour, join forces and plot to kill him…
Synopsis: It is World War II and in order to help children escape the fire-bombings of Tokyo, a Kindergarten teacher named Kaede Itakura (Erika Toda) and her friend Mitsue Nonomiya (Sakurako Ohara), persuades the parents at the school to allow them to take their children out to Saitama which is where they seek shelter at an abandoned temple.
This was directed by Satoko Yokohama and it’s her second feature film after a career of shorts which has taken her to film festivals around the world. The film stars Ken Yasuda (When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to Be Dead) and Kumiko Aso (Pulse), two people often cast in supporting roles who are great leads when given the opportunity. It has had many glowing reviews.
Synopsis: Takuji Kameoka (Ken Yasuda) is a 37-year-old bachelor who plays bit-parts and whose only interest is drinking. One day he falls in love with a bar owner (Kumiko Aso) and his boring life begins to change…
Synopsis:Sato (Haruma Miura) is lonely 27-year-old singleton who has been demoted at his job at a market survey company and is pining for a partner. Thanks to his work, he is reduced to handing out questionnaires outside Sendai Station but nobody bites until a woman named Saki walks into his life. She is wearing a black suit and has the word “shampoo” on her hand. Sato feels like this is fate and asks her out and a relationship starts but as 10 years pass, they question why they are together. This is a film about what it takes to sustain a relationship.
Synopsis from the Japan Film Festival Ireland site:When nine-year-old Yura moves from the city to a small town, he immediately feels lonely and isolated in his new environment. All that changes during a school prayer session. Yura opens his eyes, and spots a small, silent Jesus Christ dancing on the altar. The miniature Jesus, who nobody else can see, quickly becomes a regular presence in the young boy’s life. He also starts answering Yura’s prayers – including one for a new friend. However, the miraculous changes in Yura’s fortunes don’t last forever. After events take an unexpected turn for the worse, he finds himself questioning how effective his prayers really are.
This one was at the 2018 Tokyo International Film Festival and it took the AudienceAward. It is by veteran director Junji Sakamoto (Face, The Projects) and has a good cast especially Chizuru Ikewaki who is great in Being Good and The Light Shines Only There. She is partnered with Hiroki Hasegawa who is so good in Love and Peace, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? and Double Life as well as Before We Vanish. They support Goro Inagaki, a former member of SMAP who is in the lead role.
Synopsis: Hiroshi (Goro Inagaki) listlessly lives his life in a small town in Japan after taking over his father’s charcoal kiln. He uses it as an excuse to ignore his wife (Chizuru Ikewaki) and his teenage son who is going through a rebellious phase. To take his mind off things, he goes drinking with childhood friendMitsuhiko (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), a laidback guy who sometimes tells Hiroshi off for ignoring his gamily. One day, Hiroshi’s ex-friend Eisuke (Hiroki Hasegawa) comes back to his hometown after a long time in the self-defense force. Eisuke brings a truckload of old wounds back for Hiroshi but he has worries about the soundness of his own mind following his job which makes Hiroshi look at his life again…
Synopsis: Kaori (Ryoko Shinohara) is a single mother raising her daughter Futaba (Kyoko Yoshine) alone. Futaba has entered her rebellious phase and ignores her mother so Kaori decides the best way to communicate with her daughter isby creating messages in the bento meals Futaba takes to high school.
Synopsis: A man named Ikuo (Shingo Katori) spends his days drinking and gambling and when his debts become too much he is forced to move with his partner Minami (Yuri Tsunematsu) and her daughter to her home–town of Ishinomaki in Miyagi Prefecture. Things get back on track after Minami opens up a beauty salon and he becomes a fishermanand it seems like happiness is within reach for the three but things begin to happen as her ex-husband comes back on the scene and Ikuo gets mixed up with more bad characters and then Minami dies…
Synopsis:Professional wrestler Hiroshi Tanahashi stars as Takashi Omura, a man who was once a hero in the wrestling ring but after suffering an injury, he is forced to play a villain and wears a cockroach mask to do his bad guy routine. He and his wife Shiori (Yoshino Kimura) haven’t told their son Shota (Kokoro Terada) what papa does for a living so the young lad has the shock of his life when he discovers he is a pro-wrestler and a villainous one at that! The little boy feels a sense of shame…
Synopsis: After a career as a television director, Naoko Nobutomo crosses over to movies with a personal documentary chronicling the enduring love and resilience of her elderly parents in Kure, Hiroshima as her mother’s Alzheimer’s-related dementia gradually worsens. Filmed over several years, Nobutomo interweaves direct documentation with intimate home movies of her parents, including their support during her battle with breast cancer.
A film based on a novel by Yasushi Sato is usually something to take notice of after a series of good to great adaptations. Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Over the Fenceis good, while Sketches of Kaitan Cityby director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, and Mipo Oh’s The Light Shines Only Thereare great. The three are set in the author’s native city of Hakodate in the north of Japan but this film was originally set in Tokyo before being relocated to Hakodate. There’s a great cast with Shota Sometani (Himizu), Shizuka Ishibashi (The Tokyo Night Sky Is Always the Densest Shade of Blue), and Tasuku Emoto (Dynamite Graffiti). Here is my review.
Synopsis: The unnamed protagonist (Tasuku Emoto), simply referred to in the credits as “Boku” is a slacker who works at a bookstore while sharing an apartment with his unemployed friend, Shizuo (Shota Sometani). “Boku” begins dating his co-worker Sachiko (Shizuka Ishibashi) and she gets roped into his hang-about life, but Shizuo soon gets involved and a love triangle develops…
Synopsis:The Suzuki family is pretty modest. There is father Sachio (Ittoku Kishibe), mother Yuko (Hideko Hara), son Koichi (Ryo Kase) and daughter Fumi (Mai Kiryu). Koichi is a hikikomori but at least he’s alive. Then, one day, he isn’t. Without the least warning he commits suicide. Yuko is so shocked by her son’s death she loses her memory which leads Fumi to lie to her in order to preserve her sanity when she wakes up. That lie is pretty big, “Koichi stopped being a hikikomori, got better and now works in Argentina”. The drama begins as they wonder how do they keep up that story and will they be able to come to terms with his death…
Synopsis:When a thief enters a house late at night, he disturbs a murder/arson attempt by a woman in the place. The thief stops her and gets drawn into a crime that occurred 20 years ago…
Synopsis: Kaoruko Harima (Ryoko Shinohara) and her husband Kazuaki (Hidetoshi Nishijima) have two children but live separately from each other. Kaoroku takes care of them and they are preparing to divorce after their daughter’s exam for elementary school. However, an accident in a pool leaves their daughter brain dead and with no chance to recover. The couple are faced with two tough choices: donate Mizuho’s organs to others in need or wait until Mizuho’s heart stops beating.
Synopsis: Hyakkaou Private Academy is the battleground for the sons and daughters of the elite to gamble. Money and fame await the winners as does dominance over the losers so it’s all high-stakes but then amysterious transfer student named Yumeko Jabami (Minami Hamabe) arrives at the place and the bets increase to astronomical levels as she reveals that, under her pretty facade, she’s a gambling maniac.
Synopsis: Hinako moves to a coastal town to attend university. While there she can indulge her passion for surfing, something which washes away her uncertainty about her future. When a fire breaks out in town, Hinako encounters the young firefighter Minato. As they surf and spend more time together Hinako feels drawn to someone like Minato who devotes himself to helping other people. Hinako also holds a special place in Minato’s heart, and when he suddenly drowns while out surfing alone, he comes back to her as a ghost trapped in water. As everyone else gets over Minato’s death and tries to move on, Hinako comes to depend on his spirit.
A variety of these films will be screened in the following cities:
I’ve been helping my mother with Christmas preparations and buying presents whilst also watching lots of Japanese indie films. I saw one revelatory title which had me in tears and a couple of interesting ones. I have also managed to sneak in some horror movies.
Synopsis: Deku and his classmates visit Nabu Island where the peace is shattered by a villain with an unique Quirk and it looks like Shigaraki has a connection to this incident. It’s time for the class to take on the job of being heroes once again.
In This Corner (and Other Corners) of the World
この世界の（さらにいくつもの）片隅に 「Kono Sekai no (Sara ni Ikutsumono) Katasumi ni」
This is a reworking of the original 2016 film which has footage and extra characters played by Kana Hanazawa and Nanase Iwai. It is an award-winner directed by Sunao Katabuchi who directed the awesome Mai Mai Miracleand the TV animeBlack Lagoon.It was animated by the studio MAPPA (Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis,Terror in Resonance).
Synopsis: Suzu Urano (Non) is a Hiroshima girl from a close-knit family but when she marries a naval officer, she has to move from Hiroshima City to Kure, the city which launched the battleship Yamato and the site of one of Japan’s largest naval bases. As a new housewife, she encounters uncertainty in her new family, her new city, and her new world but she perseveres and finds happiness even as the war grinds on and comes closer to home.
Last War of Heavenloids and Akutoloids
天上人とアクト人 最後の戦い「Tenjounin to Akuto-nin Saigo no Tatakai」
Release Date: April 18th, 2009
Duration: 83 mins.
Director: Shigeharu Takahashi
Writer:Yoshiji Kigami (Screenplay),
Starring:Daisuke Ono (Munto), Mai Aizawa (Yumemi Hidaka), Chika Horikawa (Ichiko Ono), Hiromi Konno (Suzume Imamura),
Synopsis from ANN: Himemi has gone to the world of the Heavenloids with Munto, the Magical King, so she can save both his world and her own. Little does she know that the most difficult part won’t be facing the dangerous Union, who want to crystalize her to harness her power, but facing her own heart and the secret that lies within.
Witness to the Gegenmiao Massacre
劇場版 葛根廟事件の証言「Gekijouban Kakkonbyou jiken no Shogen」
Synopsis: Screened at the 2018 Fukuoka Independent Film Festival where it won the Best Documentary Award, this a documentary about the Gegenmiao Massacre that took place a day before the end of the Pacific War in World War II when the Soviet Army and Chinese killed and brutalised many of a group of 1,800 Japanese women and children who had taken refuge in the lamasery Gegenmiao. The film contains the testimony of 12 survivors who tell what happened.
This tribute to classic horror movie works of the 70s and 80s was filmed in the suburbs of Kobe. It was screened at the Kanazawa Film Festival this year.
Synopsis: A tale of horror where an idol named Yuka Kanda who is bad at singing but wants to go solo from her underground group because she is popular with fans. Her manager Aikawa and producer Akiyama sets her up in a camp run by the suspicious voice trainer Mipo Rin. As the lessons progress, bad stuff happens and Yuka is abducted…
Synopsis: A youth road movie where three brothers in an enka group perform songs in local snack bars and shopping streets. They hope to hit the big time while travelling to different regions when they meet a man named Machida who wants to be their manager after hearing their voices but he does a poor job.
FOR REAL Modoranai shunkan, nokosa reru mono.
FOR REAL 戻らない瞬間、残されるもの。「FOR REAL Modoranai shunkan, nokosa reru mono.」
Synopsis: This is the seventh in a series of documentaries dedicated to the Yokohama DeNA Bay Stars baseball team (the last one was released almost exactly a year ago) and it looks at their 2019 season where they had recover from a string of defeats at the start. 400 hours of footage has been boiled down into this epic documentary.
Kamen Rider: Reiwa The First Generation
仮面ライダー 令和 ザ・ファースト・ジェネレーション「Kamen Raida- Reiwa Za Fa-suto Jenere-shon」
Synopsis: This is the 11th Movie War crossover film of Kamen Rider Zero-One and Kamen Rider Zi-O. It is intended to be the first successor to the Heisei Generations Series, and serves as a tribute to the original Kamen Rider series. In the film, Sougo travels to the World of Zero-One to assist Aruto in fixing the damage caused by a Time Jacker, while Aruto learns of his family’s history as well as his own powers.
Synopsis: A quick Google search for director Nobuo Onishi reveals he is a photographer but he has turned to documentary to look at the long-term inpatients of a psychiatric hospital in Sakai City, Osaka. One patient, Toshiko Masuda, told nurses they want to go to Okinawa once in their lifetime, hence the film’s title where she and others talk about their lives and trying to realise this dream.
This film from Hirokazu Kore-eda feels like a departure from his usual interests of family dynamics because it is an exploration of the Japanese justice system but it still features his familiar interest in the atomisation of Japanese society.
Set in the snowy northern island of Hokkaido, this is an almost coldly analytical tale of a public defender taking on what should be an open and shut case and discovering that the truth is hard to pin down and that those who mete out justice sometimes aren’t interested in truth at all.
Shigemori (Fukuyama) is an elite lawyer who has been given the task of defending a man named Misumi Mikuma (Yakusho), an ex-con only just released from prison after serving a term for a murder he committed in 1986. Misumi has been arrested and charged with murdering the manager of the canning factory he works at. Misumi seems guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt because he was caught with the victim’s wallet and has confessed to the murder. A violent background, circumstantial evidence and confession. That is enough to warrant the death penalty. Shigemori has been drafted in to save Misumi.
With no real material evidence linking Misumi to the scene, Shigemori figures he might be able to get Misumi’s death sentence reduced to a prison term. All he needs to do is figure out some mitigating circumstance and get Misumi to change his confession. Cynic though he may be, Shigemori is a good lawyer and has spent his career mastering the legal system to win cases regardless of the moral rightness of the clients he defends. He still plays by the rules and so he goes on the hunt with colleagues for clues to firmly establish his case but the more Shigemori investigates and the more he talks to Misumi, the less certain he becomes of the man’s guilt and the case itself, not least because Misumi keeps changing his story.
As the case becomes muddier it turns out that the truth may lie with the daughter of the murdered manager, Sakie (Hirose), a seemingly innocent school girl with connections to Misumi, who reveals dark aspects of her home life and her mother and father’s characters which adds yet more twists in the case as Misumi denies and confirms various facts and offers contradictory statements. Variations of the truth multiply as Misumi offers slippery explanations that don’t add up and even talks to tabloid newspapers and ropes in the victim’s ex-wife as an inciting factor which makes Shigemori become ever more torn over how best to save his client.
You don’t need understanding or empathy to defend a client.
Justice, if you imagine it as a hard border separating good from bad, suddenly becomes confusing and porous as it is examined through the myriad of mitigating circumstances and morals that emerge from confessions and interviews held by Shigemori. In between, characters ponder over whether society creates criminals or if it’s human nature in lengthy discussions and even the lead protag’s father becomes a key figure as it turns out that the old man was the judge that gave a lenient sentence to Misumi in the 1980s murder case and, as Misumi’s background is investigated, various social ills that lead to murder are uncovered.
Condemning a person to the death penalty opens up a whole can of issues. All mitigating circumstances in every new confession given by Misumi are plausible and thanks to the script daring to create grey areas we wonder if he should be executed as the death penalty looks like the worst form of punishment, not least because of the way that the justice system is portrayed as rules and formalities used to keep society tidy. It culminates in an outrageous scene where we understand that justice can be rigged to be a matter of convenience rather than truth and that Shigemori had contributed to it with his cynical attitude in the past and he realises this too late. Or maybe, just in time for his own relationships with his friends and family. Far from being a murder mystery, The Third Murder becomes a criticism of the death penalty and how it is truly problematic.
With the investigation comes a lot of travelling and Kore-eda’s film features landscapes and camerawork that show off the snowy landscapes of Hokkaido which look spectacular. It is unlike anything previously filmed – Kagoshima and Fukuoka have been the furthest south as seen in Kiseki while Kanto is his typical landscape with Tokyo – Nobody Knows –, Yokohama – Still Walking – and Kamakura – Our Little Sister – providing backdrops. Kore-eda captures part of Hokkaido’s culture with small bars and restaurants making locations that add some flavour.
As the narrative winds its way through multiple theories, Shigemori’s priorities switch over the course of the film and the audience gets to enjoy watching the actors play off each other. As I wrote with the film After the Storm, there’s something about the eyes of actors that relays everything you need to know about a character and this film is a one-two punch between the performances of Koji Yakusho and Masaharu Fukuyama as their personalities hold sway over the story.
Masaharu Fukuyama portrays characters who could be considered “elite”. The rich patriarch in Like Father Like Son, he defined that role with ambition and discipline mostly through rigid body language and his flinty eyes. Cool, crisp and sharp is how I would describe him. A masculine ideal where one demands control. This allows a performer like Lily Franky and his slacker persona to really excel. Koji Yakusho, who has worked with most of the great modern directors like Juzo Itami (Tampopo), Takashi Miike (Thirteen Assassins), and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure) and Tetsuya Nakashima (director of the still totally mind-blowing film The World ofKanako), runs circles around the fixed persona of Fukuyama’s character with his warm eyes that exude a certain sparkle and madness even as his softly delivered words contain lies, hopelessness and rage. He knows more than the man assigned to protect him and, despite being as sympathetic as he can make himself, he remains a moral quandary that holds the audience’s attention to the end.
Kore-eda frames the two men in typical ways and edits their conversation with standard shot-reverse-shot techniques that uses the glass of the interview room to hold reflections and, as the case grinds on and Shigemori gets sucked deeper into it, Kore-eda imposes the images of the two men onto each other to show just how much of an effect it has on Shigemori as his notions of justice are shaken, their eyes meeting and holding so much energy.
There is also the wonderful Mikako Ichikawa who took the lead in the utterly charming Rent-a-neko who essays a functionary of the justice system and then there is Suzu Hirose, the eponymous little sister in Our Little Sister, who acts as mediator.
Through numerous interview with his client where the dialogue twists and turns, and lots of investigating and private time, we see Shigemori ride waves of doubt, both moral and professional as he tries to direct the case and it becomes a fascinating intellectual experience rather than a visceral one which we may be more familiar with from Kore-eda’s ouevre. Almost coldly analytical but with enough humanity thanks to the actors, this is a quietly critical look at the Japanese justice system.
Hirokazu Kore-eda is often compared to Yasujiro Ozu due to his depictions of families in Japan but he is quite political. Through various detailed tapestries of the rich and poor, nuclear and unconventional family units and different individuals, he has charted a myriad of lives all over the archipelago of his home nation and captured the changing dynamics of a country where tradition, social mores and people’s bonds are seemingly degrading as society adapts to new ways of thinking about work and family and people live atomised lives. Shoplifters tells the story of a most unconventional family by normal Japanese standards and, in so doing, it offers some quite stringent critiques of the exploitation of labour, the indifference of authorities and the resulting breakdown of relationships. It is a refreshingly open politicisation of content for a Japanese mainstream film and it feels akin to the social realist films of Ken Loach. This political bite could partly be the reason why the film went on to wow critics and net the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival but, as in all Kore-eda films, it is the performances that sway hearts and make audiences cry.
Osamu (Lily Franky) and his wife Nobuyo (Sakura Ando) live with their son Shota (Kairi Jyo) Nobuyo’s younger sister Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) andtheir grandmother Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) in a ramshackle home hidden behind a modern apartment. It’s a small patch of the past, a borderline derelict two-storey house from before the 80s with torn shoji and frayed tatami. It’s not uncommon to see some old post-war building sitting next to something ultra brand new in Japan but their home is in a parlous state. Too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer withholes here and there, it is clear that they are living sub-standard lives and yet they have each other and that is clearly enough as they get on well.
Do the parents have work? Yes, of the most menial sort.Osamu is a day labourer and Nobuyo works part time in a laundry. Aki earns money at a JK club where she strips for money, and Shota, well, he is young but doesn’t go to school. The money they have is not enough to cover the cost of living so they rely on Hatsue’s pension and a scam she has where she cons her ex-husband’s second family to give her handouts.To get more goods they resort toshoplifting. They steal cheap essentials from cup noodles and fruit to shampoo with the occasional luxuries to brighten their day. If it isn’t in somebody’s home, then it isn’t wrong to take it, Osamu reasons. Corporations can lose a couple of hundred yen here and there. What they steal, they share with others without a second thought and that seems to make their antics kind of okay.
Into this happy family comes a newcomer. One winter, after a shoplifting excursion, Osamu and Shota finda young girl namedYuri (Miyu Sasaki) huddling near trash outside the neighbouring apartment. It is freezing cold and Japanese winters can be brutal so theytake her home with them lest she freeze to death. It isalmost like they are shoplifting her. They know her to be a victim of abusive parents and so one night in the warm turns into something longer due to sympathy and care and Yuri becomes their new family member, not least for Nobuyo who recognises signs of physical violenceand works to draw the girl out of her shell. They rechristen her RinandShota shows her the shoplifting ropes while the others spoil her with treats. “We’re all connected by the heart,” Osamu says. Indeed, for a family that lacks so much, they compensate with a lot of warmth for each other and giving to their loved ones is in each of their natures but Yuri isn’t an object and in taking her, they risk exposing secrets at the heart of their family…
How they live is, quite frankly, going to be alien to many audience members as they filch and cheat and live a couple of levels above squalor and yet that standard of living, though extreme, can be witnessed in some areas of Japan where people have fallen on hard times and Kore-eda wants to point out the way society is fraying thanks to bonds between people turning sour and the working class being exploited by big capital and we see that exploitation.
There is strong criticism of working conditions in Japan through witnessing Osamu, Nobuyoand Aki’s jobs, the former building fancy new homes that he and his family could never hope to earn but doing so in a role with a distinct lack of protection for workers which is revealed when he gets into an accident. Nobuyo is forced to accept worsening conditions such as a work share where “everyone gets poorer” through having their contracted hours cut. Aki is turned into a commodity. The genius here is thatKore-eda showshow it is all standardised and perfectly legal and going on in real life and we seehow it feeds into their fractured lives so we understand how a new underclass of people living on the margins of society can come about.
For all of their cheating, society is cheating them even worse. The unfairness leads to the shoplifting and their petty crimesseem less offensive because, as far as the hardships endured by the characters, it’s the least immoral thing going on. And yet justice will have to be served.
We know that an end will have to come because Yuri’s parents and the police look for her and there is a growing sense of a reckoning in store for this family who live outside of society, not least because Shota begins to question Osamu about just how ethical their lifestyle is as the older man begins to get more brazen about what he takes. This cues up heartbreak and Kore-eda milks out as much as possible by showering the audience with images of warm family life and cute criminal enterprise over the seasons. Yuri pinches sweets in the summer before chasing cicadas with Shota and going to the beach with the family. At each step Yuri changes into a happier person and bonds with the others and our sympathies become entrenched with the titular shoplifters, especiallyas Yurifinds happiness and opens up. AsKore-eda layers so many sequences of care and attention where we see the characters appear to support and love each other, we enjoy and empathise and leave ourselves openfor a devastating end which twists a knife into the audience’s heart by presenting a situation that some may be able to guess but not the full extent and that is down to the performers really coming together.
Lily Franky and Kirin Kiki, both Kore-eda regulars, deliver performances that make us love them. Franky essays an easy-going person of questionable morals but a good heart so well that we cannot hate him no matter how cowardly he is while Kiki is divine as the savvy matriarch who shows time-won understanding of human nature that helps others out. Sakura Ando is the real stand out. We knew she could act as a result of 100 Yen Love with her messy character becoming a disciplined hero through sport and she has a delightfully fun comedic presence in the musical-comedy For Love’s Sake but she becomes really multifaceted here with the hard exterior she presents concealing a delicate layer of love and sensuality and care which she shows at different times to different characters. In a case of getting the best out of his child actors, the performances from Kairi Jyo and Miyu Sasaki are pitch perfect as we see them acting way past the point of innocent and they grow up before our very eyes and really inhabit their roles. We care for the kids who are the most vulnerable and Miyu Sasaki’s reactions to abuse and care are heart-rending. This allows the film to deliver a couple of gut-punches to underline how the state really doesn’t care for citizens.
Inhis depiction of an unconventional family, Kore-eda tackles familiar issues of family bonds and how what is sanctified by the state and pushed by the media is sometimes more poisonous to an individual than the love offered by alternative families as seen in Yuri’s case. Family is a matter of the heart just as much, if not more than blood. It also addresses issues of class in society in a forthright way. This is, currently, the apotheosis and refinement of Kore-eda’s oeuvre and his talent for getting into the lives of his characters and the actors brings the situation to life in the most moving of ways. In short, Shoplifters isone of his best.
Happy Weekend and Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
I hope you are well.
Welcome to the last trailer post of 2019!
This week was spent Christmasing with my mother and sister which involved getting a new pet and eating lots of good food. I managed to start watching films again, a couple of classics and and a new one and I hope to get some reviews done.
In terms of published content, two reviews for Hirokazu Koreeda films, the first being The Third Murderand the second being Shoplifters.
What’s released this weekend?
Tora-san, Wish You Were Here
男はつらいよ お帰り 寅さん「Otoko wa tsuraiyo Okaeri Torasan」
Release Date: December 27th, 2019
Duration: 116 mins.
Director:Yoji Yamada
Writer:Yoji Yamada, Yuzo Asahara (Screenplay),
Starring: Kiyoshi Atsumi, Chieka Baisho, Gin Maeda, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Kumiko Goto, Mari Natsuki, Ruriko Asaoka, Chizuru Ikewaki, Jun Miho, Mari Hamada,
It is the 50th Anniversary of the Tora-san series and this is the 50th film. Long-time director Yoji Yamada, returns to the series to bring back the travelling salesman and his adventure in love but as seen from his family’s perspective.
Synopsis:Mitsuo, Tora-san’s nephew, has arrived at Kurumaya Cafe in Shibamata, Tokyo, on the sixth anniversary of the death of his wife for a memorial service. Tora-san’s family ran the place as a traditional confectionery store before it was turned into a cafe but the living quarters in the back remain unchanged. It is here that the family gather to reminiscence about the past, including Tora-san’s adventures in love up and down Japan. It is now, at Tora-san’s childhood home, that Mitsuo runs into Izumi, his first love.
Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion: Mirai Kara Shinsoku no ALFA-X
新幹線変形ロボ シンカリオン 未来からきた神速のALFA-X「Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion: Mirai Kara Shinsoku no ALFA-X」
Release Date: December 27th, 2019
Duration: 79 mins.
Director: Takahairo Ikezoe
Writer: Kento Shimomiya (Screenplay),
Starring: Ayane Sakura (Hayato Hayasugi), Rie Kugimiya (Hokuto), Kentaro Ito (Nahane), Kotaro Yoshida (Ohanef),
Synopsis: Hayato Hayasugi and other children serve as conductors to pilot the Shinkalion, robots that are based on various models of real-life Japanese bullet trains. The children must work together with the adults of the “Shinkansen Ultra Evolution Institute” (SUEI) to defeat a monster that looks like a jet black bullet train. Hayato meets his father Hokuto when the latter travels from the past to the present as a boy to help Hayato protect Earth from a new threat.
Synopsis: Yutaka Ozaki was a singer who died at the age of 26 in 1992 but he is still popular and he is the subject of this documentary where we see some of his concerts from the 80s and, through seeing Ozaki’s songs, we understand him a bit better.
Synopsis: A documentary about race horses, in particular, those who raced. Through looking at different horses and interviewing people involved in horse racing a picture is built up.
This is a melange of things including my New Year’s Resolution and my top ten films of 2019 rolled into one.
We’re about to start a new decade and I think we all managed to hold on to our collective sanity having lived through an era of austerity, unprecedented corporate greed and malfeasance and political extremism with fascism and chauvinist/supremacist politics back in vogue. Of course, we’ve been here before many times in the past such as the 30s and 50s so we can beat this. All it takes is organising, holding officials, business and media to account and protecting our democratic institutions.
2019 was a rough year as I lost my grandfather and then there was the arson attack at Kyoto Animation in July which devastated the anime community. Fortunately, I had family who rallied around in the first case and in the second case the anime community came together to help try and ease the loss. Death helps focus the mind on what really matters which is those who we are connected to and life itself so with that in mind I hope we can go into the new decade with a renewed focus on making the world a better place and taking care of each other.
Movies get me through everything and they have kept me steady this year and now I make peace with the year and present my top ten (pretend you care) in no particular order.
This was part of the 2019 run of the New Directions in Japanese Cinema and I saw this at an early screening towards the end of the Osaka Asian Film Festival (OAFF) 2019. It was the last of the five films and it was like a shot of adrenaline in my arm at a time when I was falling asleep. The percussive editing and soundscore left me shaken and excited by the energy, the camerawork and shot selection swooning with the smoothness and snappiness, and the charismatic acting swayed me into the story of two rivals at an art school vying for a place in a prestigious university but really discovering what it means to be an artist.
I sat up in my chair and started furiously writing notes at all of the visual and aural finesse on the screen. This 30 minute short was like someone taking me for a ride in a cinematic supercar, swerving and shooting along some scenic alpine mountaintop course. Okay, that was a bit overcooked but the film stuck with me so much I made sure to review it when it came up again later in the year.
Japan is a nation with all sorts of problems but few films address them directly. This is a slice of social realism from one of the great chroniclers of Japanese life, Hirokazu Kore-eda as he tells a heartbreaking story of an unconventional family saving a little girl from abusive parents but everyone falling under the wheels of an uncaring state as a result.
In his depiction of an unconventional family who have fallen behind the rest of society, Kore-eda tackles the class system and familiar issues of family bonds and how what is sanctified by the state and pushed by the media is sometimes more poisonous to an individual than the love offered by alternative families. This is the apotheosis and refinement of Kore-eda’s oeuvre and his talent for getting into the lives of his characters and selecting actors who brings the situation to life is almost peerless. In short, Shoplifters is one of his best.
As a huge fan of the manga, and zombie movies in general, I was eager to see brought to life in a live-action format and I wasn’t disappointed as director Shinsuke Sato and writer Akiko Nogi did a fantastic job converting the first few volumes of the manga into an action spectacle replete with the essential characterisation and development that made the story so compelling.
Actor Yo Oizumi perfectly essays Hideo, the scaredy-cat manga artist and guides him through numerous chase and action sequences that lead to a fulfilling character arc. It’s one of the best zombie movies I have ever seen with one of the best opening zombie invasions committed to celluloid.
This story of a boy trying to atone for bullying a deaf girl is the work of Kyoto Animation, a studio best known for putting in a tremendous effort in design and animation to create beautiful stories, most of which are full of hope. This is one of their darkest works and after the fire at Kyoto Animation, I helped to programme it at the anime festival I work for. I believe in its quality.
I have never seen a film get the physical and mental effects of guilt and shame and the efforts of those feeling those emotions to hide it and fit in so right like this one did. The character postures, facial expressions and movements and the hesitant voices dulled with emotional pain. and yet, despite the pain, it is full of levity and hope as characters reach out and try to reassure and comfort each other and so the narrative constantly balances between the joys and sadness of human experience and the perfectly done animation brings everyone to life. I cared so much for all of the characters and I know that audiences I watched it with were moved because the emotional energy that could be felt was electric, the sobbing and crying really loud.
This film epitomised the struggle for millennials and the gap between them and previous generations through a smoothly executed genre-mashup and smart character observation through lead character Kazuhiko, a university grad taking on “menial” work and resisting pressure from older characters as he tries to maintain his happiness but gets caught up in the criminal underworld. His values shine through as ones held by young people and it leads to a very satisfying ending as he places happiness with family and friends first.
Shot in and around the Nishinari area of Osaka, it tells an amusing tale of the antics of a sex-worker, an orphan boy and a pickpocket who get drawn into an absurd search for a cauldron, the symbol of a yakuza gang, and get caught up in the wider politics of the local area. Leo Sato really brings the character of the area and the people who inhabit it out in this film which is a charming and silly tale full of respect for a unique community.
I’ve played shoji. I don’t understand it. This film makes it seem like the most important game ever even though it’s so static. Toshiaki Toyoda pushes the art of cinema as much as possible to relay the drama of shoji but what I valued most about the film is its story of a person following their dream and how that person is brought up by a community that believes in him. It results in a tearjerker of an emotional climax. The ending is a fine moment of release and the overall message of the film, and Shoji’s example, is that pursuing a passion leads to happiness. It’s a healing message in a way as it shows perseverance is a skill and it will urge audiences to keep going. It’s a message I needed to hear.
Based on real history, this presents a fast-paced narrative with a bunch of likeable characters played by the likes of Takeru Satoh, Nana Komatsu, Mirai Moriyama and Shota Sometani who take part in some swashbuckling action in nicely integrated separate sequences amidst the rugged landscape and there’s also plenty of humour – mostly the betrayals during the race..
The maturing of a little boy over a summer where his sleepy hometown is invaded by an army of cute penguins. What makes this film charming is the main character’s intelligence and the resulting confidence as this precocious child searches his local area for the reasons why the penguins came into being. His character growth features genuine moments of care and love for those around him and it was touching to watch.
This was pure delight for those familiar with the forms of Americana and movie culture that Tarantino puts on the screen and celebrates in this films but the film is more than that as we delight in the presence of characters and thus feel involved in various situations, both joyful and scary, that are developed to perfection thanks to the film’s verisimilitude and the plot which swings in and out of different storylines and delivers different types of atmosphere. The actors are charming and the movie becomes a truly moving farewell to the era portrayed. This feels a lot more mature than most of Tarantino’s works and stands as one of his best.
And those are my Top Ten Films of 2019.
What about resolutions?
Right, so, like many others, 2019 could have went better but we’re all still here and watching movies so that’s good. I also went back to Japan for the third time so that helped me complete some of my stated resolutions but I’m still adrift with others.
My resolutions for 2019
I will travel across more of Japan,
I will learn to speak, read, write and listen to Japanese to a much higher level than I currently do,
I will write down more of my adventures,
I will improve my writing style,
I will become super super positive,
I will continue to review films.
What about next year? The new decade?
My resolutions for 2020
I will travel across more of Japan,
I will learn to speak, read, write and listen to Japanese to a much higher level than I currently do,
I will write down more of my adventures,
I will improve my writing style,
I will become super super positive,
I will push myself to try and achieve more,
I will continue to review films.
I will be returning to Japan next March and I have some ambitions to do more creative writing which I will try to fulfil. There’s somebody waiting for me so that’s part of my impetus. All I can guarantee is that I’ll try my best!
My WordPress blog birthday was December 20th and it has been a decade since I first started writing reviews and news articles here about what interests me.
Through ten years of writing on this blog I have made friends and watched lots of great films. Indeed, I’ve covered a quite a range of titles and, as the years progressed, actually got involved with film culture through writing for magazines and other websites, doing festival press work at the likes of the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival and the Osaka Asian Film Festival as well as doing plenty of writing like interviews at UK festivals like Raindance, Terracotta and the London Film Festival. It has almost always been fun and I’ve even had the chance to live and travel in Japan. I can honestly say this blog has been amazing for me by helping me make friends and find my voice in this world.
So, thanks to film and writing about it, I’ve had a fun time. Indeed, sometimes the process of writing about films has been just as much fun as the viewing experience and now I want to highlight my fifteen favourite films to watch and also write about.
Strap yourself in and turn on some music for the ramblings of a film fan:
Japanese action cinema is a bit thin on the ground these days but Takashi Miike is fighting to keep it alive.
This remake of a same-named film from the 1960s sees a group of 13 samurai seek to ambush and kill a relative of a Shogun. It is all exquisite build up to an absolutely exciting climactic clash in an abandoned town which has the titular assassins slice and dice their way through an army of men in a series of set-pieces that do a lot to detail the characters. It is all told through frantic editing and fantastic camerawork, and cocky performances and the film stands up as one of Miike’s best before he went into making a deluge of movie adaptations of manga.
I saw it twice in a cinema, the first time laughing maniacally as adrenaline surged through my veins as Miike delivered a dose of action that made me delirious with delight and hype.
Are we in a dream? Which way is up? Why is Leonardo DiCaprio so cool?
Big ideas and that machine-like perfection in framing them cinematically that Nolan possesses are the order of the day as a cool cast of actors play out what is a fun mind game where the design of sets, special effects and camerawork make the most of the power of cinema to present the spectacle of dreamworld cat burglars doing a reverse heist in a dream with multiple layers. It was fun, intellectually engaging and visually astounding. I saw it twice in a cinema and was so enthusiastic about it my mother and sister went. I wish I went with them.
Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier, 2016)
I have watched many horror films growing up and now I can often see the jump-scare mechanisms and psychological sleights of hand they play before the punchline is delivered so I don’t get so frightened. Green Room isn’t a horror movie and yet it terrified me.
Green Room is a thriller and it had me more fearful for the characters than all of the horror movies I saw this decade. It’s fright-factor comes from its unpredictability as an aimless punk band find themselves in a dive somewhere out in the woods and witnesses to a murder and under siege from the killer and his friends in a green room. Their every attempt to escape is terrifying due to the confusion and violence that break out and their foes are the worst: Nazis. Great direction and a soundscape of brutal violence and battering punk rock makes this quite the experience that I still talk about even to this day. I reviewed the director’s previous film, Blue Ruin back in 2013 when it came out.
Miwa Nishikawa writes and directs films which are powered by the worst aspects of people, men in particular. I have no idea how she does it but there’s always a lot of truth in her characterisation of people that lends a power to her stories.
The Long Excuse captured a realistic sort of narcissism and self-serving self-loathing felt by a hollow egotistical artist played by Masahiro Motoki. He is a writer who loses his wife in a bus crash and he finds he can’t quite react emotionally and then Nishikawa strips his emotional defences down as she puts the writer in a situation where he starts to experience feelings for others. As he begins to care for a fellow widower and his children he begins to empathise with other people. Feeling something for others for the first time in a while allows him to truly face the loss of his loyal wife and the ending is a devastating uppercut for the audience as they experience this realisation with him. The only things worth anything in life are love, family and friends.
This was the first film I saw in a cinema after returning to the UK after living in Japan and I instantly recognised the way of life and cried.
Kore-eda has made a raft of great films in the 2010s such as the fantastic Shoplifters but my favourite is After the Storm and namely because I can identify with the protagonist: a guy with potential of being a decent writer but his efforts are hamstrung by his lackadaisical nature and procrastination. While I don’t have a gambling addiction or an ex-wife and I’m not as handsome as lead actor Hiroshi Abe, I totally got the sense of frustration and tired resignation which radiated off him as he played a son trying to live up to his mother and son’s hopes and expectations and seeing happiness being within his grasp and struggling for it.
The film features Kore-eda’s familiar themes of family, mortality and the relentless passage of time as well as an atmosphere that is tinged with sense of melancholy as the ending of relationships and the onward push for the future can be felt over a balmy autumn where the lead character has to accept that life moves on and he better start making moves before he is left with nothing.
I saw this one at the Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival 2017, a fest I proudly work for because we are one dedicated to fans of anime and the experience of watching this film with an audience of fans was to tap into the energy of a positive community and so every time the crowd went wild with delight, my energy levels were amped up.
Not that I needed a chorus of screams at the scandalous bits and guffaws at the comedic ones as the film really has a direct line to the funny bone.
Its story of fate putting together and pulling apart two students from Kyoto university is really charming as they go through various magical realist encounters and enjoy the nightlife and the weird and wonderful people they can meet in Kyoto. It captures the magic of the city and the idea of chance and fate linking people in a raucous community and it is wonderfully animated by Masaaki Yuasa and his team at Science Saru who give the characters rubbery and exaggerated animation that contains a joie de vivre.
The first Rurouni Kenshin movie I saw in a cinema and I fell in love with it despite having no prior interest in the franchise. It’s big-budget looks and action scenes and likeable acting performances made it a great time so when the second film was brought into cinemas I was pleased to see the scale of the story had increased and everything on the screen managed to fill it.
Taking key moments from Japanese history, the Kenshin saga brings them to life in the most cinematic way possible with fantastic sets, locations, costumes to make an epic adventure full of distinctive and colourful characters whose backstories are revealed to be linked to the birth of the modern nation and the film gets its tension by showing how their actions and beliefs will dictate the future. It has lots of grit thanks to the combat which, while not bloody, is brilliantly choreographed and shot to get across the brutality and skill of combatants and there are great performances by Takeru Satoh, Tatsuya Fujiwara, and Ryunosuke Kamiki who bring a lot of charisma to their roles.
This is a first-rate drama about how people deal with mental health as one man faces ostracisation from his own family after a tragedy occurs to an innocent. It features raw emotions that create harrowing moments of cinema but also life affirming ones that will make you see the value of human connections.
I cried every time I watched it as the hurt and anger felt real and the beautiful imagery and eventual healing acted as a balm.
Do you know what’s scarier than a horror movie? Real life! People can be monsters and this is displayed no better than in here where a seemingly innocent highschooler named Kanako goes missing and her psychotic ex-detective father played by Koji Yakusho goes in search of her.
The theme of the darkness that lurks inside everyone is brought out to perfection by the script where seemingly innocent characters are shown to be morally compromised through having a cut-up narrative assembled by the detective who creates a picture of different evils afflicting Japan. A fantastic cast of actors brought to life a collection of eccentric and dangerous and unpredictable people and this helped make the film an absolute thrill-ride.
I had the privilege of meeting Nakashima and getting my picture taken with him.
Miwa Nishikawa’s tale of a couple who lose everything and plan to scam it all back by defrauding lonely women of the money through the husband charming them into romantic relationships. It has all the hallmarks of a black comedy but it develops into an examination of the irrationality of love and sympathy as the couple’s character’s become distorted by their actions and their relationship turns bitter and twisted as the husband and wife become increasingly confused and unable to maintain the hardheadedness needed to maintain the scam. The moral murk is real and the sympathy shown to everyone is tremendous so we find ourselves sucked into the morass.
Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)
I am a big fan of the first Blade Runner and so I went to the cinema with a little trepidation but needn’t have been worried since the film did better than my expectations.
Incredible visuals which have to be seen on the biggest screen you can get to, a fantastic soundscore, and great direction brought to life a world so well-realised I lost track of time and felt fully immersed in what was going on in the film. The story is a perfect continuation and answers a lot of questions from the first film such as if Deckard is a Replicant and it also has lots of humanity for each of its characters.
There is a serious inability for people to actually confront the ugliness of human nature. The treatment of slavery is one example as people would rather gloss over the reality and watch Gone with the Wind and have weddings in plantations than try to understand the suffering inflicted on a group of people so we can make peace and move forward together. Sort of like using films as a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This film goes some way to redress the balance. It is based on the autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped by slavers in New York and sold to plantations in the southern states of America from which he tries to escape. Director Steve McQueen paints a complicated picture of plantation life and does not flinch from showing the gruesome details of the slave system. The film becomes harrowing as it enters the territory of horror both physical and psychological and delivers a real sense of what slavery must have been like while also beautiful at times.
This thriller about a ghoulish loner named Lou Bloom, an amoral guy who cannibalises others to rise up the career ladder in the American news media, tells us everything you need to know about how the media can have corruption in its heart and the gig economy turns us into cogs in a wheel or monsters. The role of Bloom is taken by Jake Gyllenhaal, a great actor who oozes strangeness and charisma and I was swept up by his performance which was equal parts sleaze and intelligence. Journeying with him through the nighttime streets of LA makes the film unpredictable until it builds to an exciting conclusion.
A handsome and mysterious guy rocks up on the doorstep of a family mourning the loss of a son in Afghanistan and he inveigles his way into their circle by being the perfect son, the perfect brother, the perfect object for sexualisation. The audience is charmed but the direction of the movie lets us know that something is off. It is revealed that he is the perfect killing machine.
I came to this film having watched Adam Wingard’s home-invasion thriller, You’re Next (2013) and after having quickly clued myself up on mumblegore movies. While The Guest has the sort of skeleton of a serial-killer thriller, it has the flesh of an action film and so there’s a lot of build-up, with macabre and violent jokes at the expense of various people he meets on the way before it erupts into a non-stop action frenzy where nobody is guaranteed to be alive at the end. I absolutely loved the bait-and-switch, the acting, and the direction which ekes out every bit of cool and every horror reference going.
I watched this film and recognised the Tokyo I lived in – exhausting, energetic, massive, fun, full of people and chances. Sadness, happiness, it’s all there and told through the lives of a group of characters audiences will surely come to care about. Yuya Ishii handles the different narratives well and it’s great getting involved in the lives of ordinary people. I loved every minute of my experience in Tokyo (no exaggeration) and every minute of this film which is why I wanted to start 2018 with it!
A group of psycho-cinephiles who are getting nowhere in their cinematic careers get caught up in a gang war which is mainly being fought by the leader of one side so he can steal the daughter of the other gang’s boss. It’s a bizarre set-up and gets hilarious when said cinephiles exploit the situation for a film fit, not necessarily for Cannes, but definitely for the Pia Film Festival.
This one was an absolute ball that had me rocking in my chair and grinning from ear-to-ear from start to finish as brash characters lived their lives to the fullest before crashing into each other with violence, drugs and passion. It’s a melange of influences and action that hangs together because of Sono’s energy. The film is replete with cinematic references to classic movies from Kinji Fukasaku and Bruce Lee and it also has the joie de vivre of working in cinema. It is told with an energetic visual style that wows the eyes but also leaves enough room for the actors who get to play characters fed up with their lives that are going nowhere.
As the credits for this film rolled, I turned to the person sat next to me, a total stranger, and said “This was better than Citizen Kane.” I was only half joking. This film is a blast and I rewatch it at least once a year.
This story of a boy trying to atone for bullying a deaf girl is the work of Kyoto Animation, a studio best known for putting in a tremendous effort in design and animation to create beautiful stories, most of which are full of hope. This is one of their darkest works.
I have never seen a film get the physical and mental effects of guilt and shame and the efforts of those feeling those emotions to hide it and fit in so right like this one did. The character postures, facial expressions and movements and the hesitant voices dulled with emotional pain. and yet, despite the pain, it is full of levity and hope as characters reach out and try to reassure and comfort each other and so the narrative constantly balances between the joys and sadness of human experience and the perfectly done animation brings everyone to life. I cared so much about all of the characters and I know that audiences I watched it with were moved because the emotional energy that could be felt was electric, the sobbing and crying really loud.
This is another film about bullying and outsiders and it’s very touching as we see a firm friendship forged between two high school girls but then it goes off in a direction you will never suspect.
Their isolation and need for each other is palpable thanks to the acting of mimpi * β and Izumi Okamura, both relative amateurs when they started but the latter still doing indie movies while the former has continued her career a musician. The great direction and fine acting means we feel every tremulous emotion emanate from the screen and that means when they bridge the gap of their differing personalities, their friendship feels vital and that’s why I enjoyed the film so much.
Two outsiders lost in a fog of confused emotions and mistreatment at the hands of others and just sheer bad luck. The sunny seaside setting of the port city of Hakodate may look nice but we see the seedier side of things with prostitution and alcoholism, sexual exploitation and other crimes but we marvel at the resilience of the two characters as they seek some light in their darkness. Chizuru Ikewaki was magnificent and Go Ayano made a strong impact in a film that was tough but perfect in every way.
A lot of the films in this list are examples of heightened realism or just plain magical realism and fantasy but this one is realist in tone. It captures the flatness that can be felt in life and the casual cruelty but also the mundane beauty of everyday settings and the powerful feeling of love.
Japan is a nation with all sorts of problems but few films address them directly. This is a slice of social realism from one of the great chroniclers of Japanese life, Hirokazu Kore-eda as he tells a heartbreaking story of an unconventional family saving a little girl from abusive parents but everyone falling under the wheels of an uncaring state as a result.
In his depiction of an unconventional family who have fallen behind the rest of society, Kore-eda tackles the class system and familiar issues of family bonds and how what is sanctified by the state and pushed by the media is sometimes more poisonous to an individual than the love offered by alternative families. This is the apotheosis and refinement of Kore-eda’s oeuvre and his talent for getting into the lives of his characters and selecting actors who brings the situation to life is almost peerless. In short, Shoplifters is one of his best.
We live in a world where we are grappling with the toxic cross-over between traditional media and social-media and this film got a number of things right from it’s very engaging story of a TV director with a Twitter addiction who takes up the scandalous story of the murder of a beautiful woman and becomes morally-compromised as he shepherds the reporting of the story, manipulates it online and to grow its infamy which, in turn, allows his “influence” of the media circus to blossom. It becomes an ego boost which has serious real-world consequences but there’s also a wholesome story of true friendship which runs through the story and gives it an emotional knockout blow at the end. There is smart commentary on the vicious circle created by media and social-media and the way the younger generation, kept in precarious jobs, are incentivised to take advantage of this which is brilliantly shown in this film.
It should be paired up with Nightcrawler and screened with Network (1976).
Noriko Yuasa is definitely a director to watch. She is regularly in work and her eye for visuals and her ear for soundscapes is incredible. She truly uses the scope of cinema to make some really enthralling films when she’s let off the hook based on this work alone.
I had no idea what I was going to get with this short but a big grin on my face during and after it wasn’t necessarily the first thing on my mind. Its story of a teacher looking in on a sick student and getting swept up into the family is one that starts quiet enough and ends on such a macabre and blackly comic note that I was very pleased at how the film developed and how it was shot around the Arakawa river which I used to walk up and down and how Yuasa used the power of cinema to make it alien.
A five hour film about four thirty-something female friends provided a lot of substance as lives and social mores in contemporary Japan are explored and it also provided a lot of relief in the sense that it showed Japanese cinema could tackle adult subjects with subtlety and depth. It will be divisive due to its slow-moving nature but I found it worthwhile since it spent its time revealing universal truths about human relations.
And, yes, after living in Japan, I can confirm this hits the mark in terms of atmosphere. And, yes, I sat through the whole thing so I deserve a film medal or something!
My taste in art runs from Impressionists and Old Masters to installations created by contemporary Japanese artists. This film is about one of the leading contemporary artists in the World, Rei Naito. It gives us something of her background and method of work but it goes in depth into how art makes us feel and the connections artists make with the people who view their work. It’s shot in such a cinematic way by Yuko Nakamura that it’s easy to engage with the art and feel how vital it is to life. A very rewarding film!
This was part of the 2019 run of the New Directions in Japanese Cinema collection and I saw this at an early screening towards the end of the Osaka Asian Film Festival (OAFF) 2019. It was the last of the five films and it was like a shot of adrenaline in my arm because I was falling asleep during the fourth one. The percussive editing and soundscore of Last Judgement left me shaken and excited by the energy, the camerawork and shot selection swooning with the smoothness and snappiness, and the charismatic acting swayed me into the story of two rivals at an art school vying for a place in a prestigious university but really discovering what it means to be an artist.
I sat up in my chair and started furiously writing notes about all of the visual and aural finesse on the screen. This 30 minute short was like someone taking me for a ride in a cinematic supercar, swerving and shooting along some scenic alpine mountaintop course. Okay, that was a bit overcooked but the film stuck with me so much I made sure to review it when it came up again later in the year.
These are my top films of the decade – there are plenty that could vied for that honour like Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans, Poetry and The Wolf Children, but these are the ones I liked the most. I have always felt that 2014 was my happiest year for cinema outings and this proves to be the point with so many titles. I really wish my mother, sister, friends and I can keep going to the cinema together like we did back then.
I’ve covered a lot of film festivals over the decade but my favourite festivals to check out continually are Berlinale, Rotterdam, OAFF, and Japan Cuts.
I also do film interviews and I have enjoyed all of them. Directors Yosuke Takeuchi from OAFF 2018 and Takashi Nishihara and actress Manami Usamaru at OAFF 2019 are two I would like to highlight, the latter because his movie, The Sower, was really moving and I really recommend it while the latter proved useful to people who wanted to know more about the film Sisterhoodwhich played at Busan in September. Indeed, I hope all the interviews prove useful to people looking to find out more about Japanese indie films. Okay, I’ll be honest, after startling her with a question Usamaru-san said she liked my voice because it lulled her to sleep. I’ll take that as a compliment (humour me!).
Will I continue writing? Absolutely. There are many more films for me to cover. I’ll be in Osaka next year and so stick with me as I continue to evolve.
Thanks for taking the time to read it and Happy New Year!
Welcome to the first trailer post of 2020 and the new decade!
I hope you are well.
My New Year’s Day was spent watching films and writing about them and eating some good home-cooked food made by my mother. Some Kon Ichikawa and Naomi Kawase to start the year! I then went back to work the very next day so that was a bit of a drag after 11 days off work relaxing. Oh well, I can’t complain about my job.
2020 might be the year when I switch.
As for this blog, business as usual. I spent the week reminiscing about the last decade with Monday’s post dedicated to my Top Ten Films of 2019 and Wednesday’s post given over to the Top 25 Films of the Decade. It’s a unique list compared to a lot of others I have seen on social media but that’s because I focus mostly on Japanese films.
Enough about the past! What about the present?
There’s a small but very diverse selection of films released this weekend, most of which look genuinely interesting. So…
Synopsis: Documentarian Koji Hijikata (Yakuza and the Constitution) is back with another doc and this one looks at the current television through following Tokai Television, a private broadcaster that is trying to stay relevant in an age where young people have replaced television with the internet. Cameras follow the staff in the news department. The doc was originally broadcast exclusively in the Tokai region as a program commemorating the 60th anniversary of the opening of Tokai TV and it is now in cinemas with additional footage.
Synopsis: Excerpts from the performance for Kuruwa Bunsho Yoshidaya (link to synopsis), a kabuki tale set in Osaka where two lovers, one a courtesan and the other a disinherited son of a merchant family are kept apart by class boundaries. This has a relatively happy ending, thankfully. In addition to the stage footage, interviews with Nizaemon Kataoka are included as he talks about his life as an actor and his thoughts on this work and playing opposite famed onna-gata Tamasaburo Bando who takes on the role of the courtesan Yugiri.
Kappa II But, we have to rest.
河童II But, we have to rest.「Kappa II But, we have to rest.」
Synopsis: A woman named Futami, has loyally worked for a mid-sized company ever since graduating from high school. In her 40 years on the job, she has never encountered anything strange and is about to retire soon although that all changes when she finds a kappa at a shrine she visited for her company and falls into an alternate kappa world where she meets more of them. She realises that their lives are similar to those of humans and she also realises that she wants to get home back to her world.
Based on a 2007 one-person play “Watashigatari” produced and directed by lead actress Agasa Okada, this was directed by Taishi Shiode of Death and Tanya fame. Out of all of the trailers, this one looks the best because of the lead actress’s energy.
Synopsis: Yuki thinks every day about whether she is a “special being”. That’s not uncommon but she gets caught up in all sorts of philosophical knots about her place on the Earth and in the universe.
I have been writing about films here for a decade and ever since I started writing badly translated synopses to highlight interesting films, I have had a list in my mind of titles that I want to watch. I add and subtract films from said list but many listed here have remained in my mind. These ten films I have never forgotten and since it has been ten years since I first started blogging, I want to make an effort and track them down to review them the next time I am in Japan. Which is… SOON!
Will I see any of these films? Who knows, but I want to watch them.
I actually stood next to the director at two editions of the Osaka Asian Film Festival – we met TWICE – and totally forgot that he made this film and focused on talking to other directors who were stood next to us. If I’d talked to the chap, I might have got a screener for this… Here’s what I wrote at back in 2013:
Shin Shin Shin is a film which was directed by Kouhei Sanada who was mentored by Kiyoshi Kurosawa at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. That same university played a massive part in another title below, Fairy Tale. The film’s title comes from a song of the same name by the folk rock band Happy End who hail from the 70’s. Is this it? This is a road movie which stars Miwako Wagatsuma who was in Sentimental Yasuko and End of Puberty and Megumi Kagurazaka who was in Cold Fish and The Land of Hope.
Synopsis: Tomoyuki (Ishida) is a high school student who lives with the Tekiya family, a group of strangers with no other place to go. A girl named named Yuki (Wagatsuma) joins the group but when their home is demolished they head off on a journey that leads them from town to town with no particular destination in mind.
I’m just intrigued. It’s about art and creativity and I like meta-narratives so I have wanted to see this for a while.
This was a victim of my bad translation skills… The first in a long line of victims… Anyway this is written and directed by the poet Kenji Fukuma, a man with two other directorial efforts to his name – Summer for the Living (2011), which starred Saori Kohara, and My Dear Daughter of Okayama (2008). He reunites with the actress Kohara for this fantasy drama about the emotions of a 20-year-old Tokyoite which interweaves interviews, poetry and dances so that the film blurs dreams and reality.
Synopsis from JFDB: 20-year-old Yuki Sasaki lives by herself in Tokyo. One day she chances upon a poetry reading by poetess Yumi Fuzuki and the experiences makes her lose sight of her purpose in life. In the process, another Yuki (Kawano) appears before her. We see her reality and dreams in a series of interviews and performances like dancing and poetry that are captured on film.
GFP Bunny
タリウム少女の毒殺日記 「GFP Bunny Tariumu shojo no dokusatsu nikki」
Running Time: 82 mins.
Release Date: July 06th, 2013
Director: Yutaka Tsuchiya
Writer: Yutaka Tsuchiya
Starring: Yuka Kuramochi, Kanji Furutachi, Makiko Watanabe, Takahashi,
I first saw this when it appeared at the 2013 edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival and it has never left my mind. I don’t know the quality but I’m thoroughly curious and even made Gifs.
At the time, I wrote this:
It is directed by Yutaka Tsuchiya, who is considered one of the more interesting names amongst indie film makers in Japan and scored major kudos with his film Peep “TV” Show and it stars great actors like Kanji Furutachi who has appeared in trashy genre piece Dead Waves and the great films The Woodsman & the Rain and Dreams for Sale. He is supported by Sion Sono regular Makiko Watanabe (Himizu, Love Exposure).
Synopsis: Apparently based on a true story (with some key facts changed), we follow the actions of Thallium Girl (Kuramochi) who is slowly poisoning her mother with thallium and records the results with her detached world-view in her diary. It is clear she has some mental problems which are exacerbated by bullying at school. This just causes her to retreat from reality into a darker place which includes extreme body modification…
This is a female driven film with a lady directing and co-writing the film and ladies taking the lead in this drama about two women working on a radio play. They become “frenemies”. It was screened at the 2014 edition of the Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Synopsis: Aya (Ishizaki) is beautiful but self-centered woman who has few friends. While she works in an office her dream is to be a scriptwriter and she attends night school to learn the craft. Her hard work pays off when a radio programme selects her script but there’s one condition: Aya needs to have a co-writer. So close to her dream, Aya thinks hard and selects Sachiko to be the second person. Aya believes Sachiko has a quiet and modest personality but things go awry when Sachiko starts acting and dressing like Aya…
Uzumasa Jacopetti featured in Third Window Films’s Top Ten Japanese films of the year when it was released and I’ve not been able to get it out of my memory. The plot and the trailer look crazy fun, what with gore, sex and the possibility of black comedy of epic proportions.
Synopsis: The story is set in Uzumasa, Kyoto and it follows Shoji Hyakkan (Wada), a man who gives up his job to make a house held together by magnets for himself, his wife and son. When he’s caught stealing and killing a cow for its hide by a police officer (Kobayakawa) he isn’t locked up. No, in fact he’s given an interesting offer involving his dismemberment skills and local hoodlums. It’s an indie production from first-time director Moriro Miyamoto. Please someone, release this in the west!
This one is a wild card. Sturm und Drang comes from Isao Yamada, director of Grass Labyrinth (1983) and it is all about a group of artists and anarchists in Taisho era Japan (1910’s – 20’s) who form a terrorist group named “Guillotine Inc.” and plot revolution against the government. Then the Kanto earthquake of 1923 strikes… That was a particularly nasty time in Japan’s history as mobs attacked Koreans who were accused of committing crimes in the aftermath of the disaster and also anti-establishment figures such as the feminist Noe Ito and her partner, the anarchist Sakae Osugi, the two of whom were put into a film called Eros + Massacre by director Yoshishige Yoshida and his actress wife Mariko Okada. The characters in the film are up against a brutal government but amidst the bleakness there seems to be comedy and delightful artistic moments that fit in with the character’s occupations.
Synopsis: Winter 1922, the poet and social activist Tetsu Nakahama has finished searching out his comrades and returns to Tokyo where he and his pals found the anarchist organization “Guillotine Society” in the hope of fomenting a revolution. They plan to assassinate a high-profile target: Prince of Wales who is visiting Japan…
FORMA is an award-winning film directed by Ayumi Sakamoto. It played at numerous film festivals such as Berlin in 2014 where it won prizes and it’s screening there was when I first posted about it and got the following blurb from the fest:
Director Ayumi Sakamoto has been in the film industry for a spell having worked as an actress and in the camera and electrical department of a number of films like Vital and other Shinya Tsukamoto films where she learned directing and cinematography skills. Shot in a muted palette of greys, blacks and beiges in perfect tandem with the colourless lives of its protagonists, Ayumi Sakamoto’s striking debut has a keen grasp of friendship’s grey areas and linguistic cadences. A slow-burning thriller whose long, rigorously composed shots demand closer scrutiny: never disregard the unspoken and the unseen.
I like the dark storyline driving this one but what gets me is the fact that the director is one to watch and from what I’ve read, she employs lots of technically brilliant flourishes and gets the best out of her actors to make this dark and compelling drama come to life.
Synopsis: One day, Ayako Kaneshiro is reunited with her former classmate Yukari Hosaka. She invites Yukari to join her company, and she accepts. However, Ayako begins to treat Yukari coldly and act strangely around her. Yukari feels increasingly pressured, but Ayako has her reasons. The pent-up hatred within her deepens the darkness in her heart. To confirm her own feelings, Ayako confronts Yukari. Their conflicting emotions intertwine… What lies at the end of this cycle of hatred?
The Voice of Water
水の声を聞く 「Mizu no Koe wo Kiku」
Release Date: August 30th, 2014 (Japan)
Running Time: 129 mins.
Director: Masashi Yamamoto
Writer: Masashi Yamamoto (Screenplay),
Starring: Hyunri, Shuri,Natsuko Nakamura, Jun Murakami, Takashi Oda, Gen Sato, Akahiro Kamataki, Eiko Nishio,
This film came from Cinema Impact, the guys who did Be My Baby (2013). I was intrigued by it when I wrote about it for a trailer. It features a cast of new actors and a very good actor in the shape of Jun Murakami. It’s all about Korea-town in Tokyo and the people who exist in it which could fascinating in and of itself when you think of the cultural issues involved but there’s the story of a cult and a girl at the centre who wants to escape here as well which adds more intrigue.
Synopsis: This one takes place in Korea Town in Tokyo where yakuza roam and is all about a Korean-Japanese woman named Minjon (Hyunri) who comes from a long line of shamans who speacialise in hearing messages from the water. She listens to people who are mostly outcasts and gives them a response in Korean which they are unable to understand. Believers keep seeking her out but she has misgivings about how she is exploited by businessmen who use her to found the God’s Water sect and wring money out of people. This group has built up around her and she is ready to leave it behind and do so through her Korean ancestry.
Okay, this one is a bit of a cheat because I have it and will watch it soon. Here’s what I wrote back when it hit the festival circuit:
This is another film that I missed and it hurts. Watch the trailer. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Magical as well, right? Do you want to know why I attend film festivals? To see the little gems that don’t get a home cinema release and to experience films on the big screen, especially beautiful ones. I will forever regret not seeing this at the Pan-Asian Film Festival earlier this year because the trailer is beautiful, mysterious, majestic, and the story sounds so intriguing and the reviews I read were all full of a mind-boggling level of praise.
Synopsis: It is winter. A man (Min Tanaka) finds a baby girl in the snow by a freezing lake in the mountains of Tokushima and takes her in. He gives her the name Haruna and they live far away from other people. The baby grows into a caring woman (Rina Takeda) who looks after the man.
It is summer. A stranger from Tokyo arrived at “Iya”, where the riches of nature still abound. His name is Kudo, and he wants to start a new life in the country to refresh his tired soul. Unfortunately the reality was not as easy as he thought because there is a confliction between a local construction company and a group of nature conservationists.
One day, Kudo meets the old man and Haruna and finds out that they lead lives completely different from his own. The old man is a farmer who climbs up the mountain to go to the little shrine to offer Omiki (sake) to the mountain god and Haruna goes to high school an hour away from home, and after that, helps Grandpa to plow his field. Feeling his heart gradually healing, Kudo thought that he finally found what he was looking for in their calm life but a destructive winter occurs…
Hold Your Breath Like a Lover
Hold Your Breath Like a Lover Film Poster
息を殺して 「Iki wo Koroshite」
Release Date: June 20th, 2015
Running Time: 85 mins.
Director: Kohei Igarashi
Writer: Kohei Igarashi (Screenplay),
Starring: Goichi Mine, Yusuke inaba, Ran Taniguchi, Koji Harada, Tomomitsu Adachi, Ran Arai, Rina Tanaka, Yuki Inagaki
When I saw the trailer for this I immediately tweeted my film friends about it and they were equally hyped. I have never forgotten this one and watch the trailer from time to time and even searched out the music(!) but couldn’t find it. Here’s what I wrote when it first came out.
Kohei Igarashi studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts which is where Kiyoshi Kurosawa teaches. His film has shades ofPulse(2001) to it what with the apocalypse angle which makes it intriguing but it also looks gorgeous! It was at this year’s Nippon Connection and I’m pretty devastated that I may not get to see it!
Synopsis: It is sometime in the near-future in a seemingly abandoned factory. A handful of workers spend their time playing video games, battling out love conflicts and aimlessly walking through gloomy offices and corridors while haunted by the ghosts of the dead in what seems to be the preamble to the apocalypse.
And that’s it. I hope to find these films this year!
From January 22nd to February 02nd 2020, the Rotterdam International Film Festival will screen a diverse mix of films from old masters and new talents and the Japanese contingent epitomises this with familiar names like Kazuo Hara and Nobuhiko Obayashi having their latest works picked up, after they had their premieres at the Tokyo International Film Festival last year, alongside the freshest titles from newer voices like documentarian Kaori Oda and Isamu Hirabayashi who has worked a lot in anime.
Here are the Japanese movies, the newest titles first:
Three titles in the BRIGHT FUTURE category, two from females and one by a guy:
This is a mid-length film that has a sci-fi edge to it as it casts its gaze to the future of Tokyo. It comes from Maiko Endo, a director, producer and composer who has worked around the world and won awards.
Synopsis: Changes are afoot in Tokyo in the run-up to the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games as new buildings spring up and the populace unite behind the idea of being digitised in the ‘Fusion’ programme which will allow authorities to monitor and control their minds. There are some who resist such as two teen girls with special gifts and their special mission.
Documentarian Kaori Oda studied under Béla Tarr in Sarajevo and while in Bosnia she filmed the lives of coal miners (Aragane) and also her own journey as a filmmaker and human in (Towards a Common Tenderness).
Synopsis: Kaori Oda travels to the Northern Yucatan in Mexico where she ventures around natural sinkholes called ‘cenotes’ and explores the past, where Mayans used them for water sources as well as sacrifices and saw the cenotes as a connection to the afterlife, and she sees how these memories inform the present of those living around the cenotes. She pushes her style further here in what look like beautiful sequences, the festival blurb sounding quite intriguing,
“Long-lost memories echo in hallucinatory turquoise underwater footage, an entrancing game of light and dark. Swimming in these sinkholes, director Oda Kaori encounters intriguing shapes and beams of light, the water heaves, drops fall like razor blades.”
Synopsis: Nitobe and Sakamoto are friends from childhood who now work at the front desk of a capsule hotel. Nitobe has a particular fondness for philosophy and crustaceans. Sakamoto, meanwhile, is fixated on suicide. The capsule hotel draws a variety of guests, including a Finnish mother who has lost her child, a fugitive woman, and a researcher studying Daphnia. None of their lives ever intersect. Nor do any of the lives out of it for that matter. They exist, but never cross, like cells in a capsule hotel. With crustaceans as leitmotif, the themes of life and death are explored through a fragmentary view of the characters’ lives.
The older titles range from films that have already been on the festival circuit at places like Tokyo, Cannes, Locarno and an animation screened at Annecy to a documentary from the 1980s. It’s a mixed bag so please take a look.
Last year was the 50th Anniversary of the Tora-san series and this is the 50th film. Long-time director Yoji Yamada, returns to the series to bring back the travelling salesman and his adventure in love but as seen from his family’s perspective.
Synopsis:Mitsuo, Tora-san’s nephew, has arrived at Kurumaya Cafe in Shibamata, Tokyo, on the sixth anniversary of the death of his wife for a memorial service. Tora-san’s family ran the place as a traditional confectionery store before it was turned into a cafe but the living quarters in the back remain unchanged. It is here that the family gather to reminiscence about the past, including Tora-san’s adventures in love up and down Japan. It is now, at Tora-san’s childhood home, that Mitsuo runs into Izumi, his first love.
Kazuo Hara (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On) gave the world premiere of this at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival and, at the time in my post, I stated… “I suspect that this one will get play at festivals around the world. Fight the power!” Fight the power, indeed!
Synopsis:Kazuo Hara follows Ayumi Yasutomi, a transgender Tokyo University professor and a candidate from the anti-establishment party Reiwa Shinsengumi as she embarks on a national campaign for a seat in Japan’s Upper House.
Synopsis:A group of young people at a soon-to-be-shuttered cinema find themselves time-slipping through the screen to various historical events such as witnessing death during the Sengoku period and on the battlefront in China, being in Hiroshima just before the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing of the city. This was shot in Obayashi’s hometown in Onomichi and seems to have an anti-war message.
Directed by Katsuya Tomita (Bangkok Nights), he makes documentary and fiction combine as we get a look at where Buddhism fits in modern Japan as two priests react to the 3/11 disaster.
Synopsis: Chiken and Ryugyo are both Buddhist monks and apply their vocation in different ways with Chiken manning a suicide helpline, teaching yoga and healthy eating in his temple in Yamanashi while in Fukushima, Ryugyo – whose temple was wrecked by the tsunami – lives in a portacabin and works on construction sites in an effort to repair communities.
There cast actors are late-stage Miike film regulars includingMasataka Kubota, who worked with Miike on13 Assassins (2010), Nao Omori, the titular Ichi in Miike’s classic Ichi the Killer (2001), Shota Sometani, who appeared in Miike’s As the God’s Will (2014) and Lesson of the Evil (2013). Forget those recent films, from the details and the trailer this one looks to harken back to his late 90s/early 2000s output of the man. Here is the trailer and some extracts:
Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Director’s Fortnight)
Synopsis: Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a boxer whose career and life have hit the rocks. Losing fights and with a developing brain tumour, he is almost out for the count but then he meets his ‘first love’ Monica, a call-girl and an addict who is unwittingly caught up in a drug-smuggling scheme. Fate places them at the centre of a night-long chase where the two are pursued by a corrupt cop, a yakuza, his nemesis, and a female assassin sent by the Chinese Triads.
Synopsis: This short animation comes from two veteran animation directors, probably most famous for their work on Animerama and Night on the Galactic Railroad respectively, who adapt a tale by Yasunari Kawabata where a man borrows an arm from a young beautiful woman for a night.
Synopsis:Ruka is a young girl who lives with her father who works in an aquarium. When two boys, Umi and Sora, who were raised in the sea by dugongs, are brought to the aquarium, Ruka feels drawn to them and begins to realise that she has the same sort of supernatural connection to the ocean that they do. and the three get caught up in a series of strange events such as the appearance of sea creatures far from their home territory and the disappearance of aquarium animals around the world. However, the exact nature of the boys’ power and of the abnormal events is unknown, and Ruka gets drawn into investigating the mystery that surrounds her new friends.
Synopsis: Independent filmmaker and poet Suzuki Shiroyasu used film as a diary and recorded “15 days” from November 11 to December 3 1979 in an example of “Self Documentary”.
He recorded himself for six minutes each day using a camera with audio recording capabilities. This was a daily routine which he drew-up himself. However, for the first few days, we end up viewing him from behind, making weak excuses about his day to day existence being filled with deadlines for magazines and newspapers, moaning about sleeping during the day and working at night, and voicing his regrets about deciding to make the film at all. He shrinks as if cornered by the audience, and whilst we can sense slight variations in his daily sensibility, we are not able to ascertain much more than that. A week passes, and when the first rush has receded, he begins to think about how he should act in front of the camera. At this point we see the sort of results his method can bring. Finally, on the last day, he comes up with his own sense of the direction in which the work should go. With 6 minutes a day, there are some days in which he doesn’t have much to say, and others when the time is just not long enough. Occasionally, the sound of the camera running seems to be torturing him or hurrying him along, and at times it even makes us, the audience, feel anxiety: as if we were ourselves being filmed.
Synopsis: Cambodian-American dancer Prumsodun Ok is the subject of a film where the camera watches his sensual bodily movements while a prayer is recited, the act drawing inspiration from Cambodian legends, spiritual beliefs and resilience as he dances to revive Khmer classical dance.
Shinichiro Ueda, director of One Cut of the Dead, brings his second feature film to the screen…
Synopsis: Kazuto is a timid young guy who prefers to stay indoors to watch the adventures of the psychic hero Rescueman instead of being stressed outside. Despite this, he dreams of being an actor. When his brother, whom he hasn’t seen in a while, tells him about working at an agency where people can hire him to play a family member, Kazuto ends up being involved in a real life drama when a young woman named Yumi asks for help from the Special Actors to save her family’s inn from being sold to a brainwashing cult. The Special Actors devise a complex plan that depends upon Kazuto…
Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Nosferatu, Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans) filmed this during a brief stop in Japan. His film is about people who rent themselves out to play roles in life: work colleagues, friends etc. It’s something seen in Sion Sono’s film Noriko’s Dinner Table (2006). A lot of reviews for this hype up the “weird Japan” angle but it seems like a perfectly normal service for a society that is becoming atomised. Anyway, this service and the man in the film was featured on a funny bit for Conan O’Brien.
Synopsis:Yuichi Ishii is the focus of the film. He is one of the actors employed by an agency called Family Romance. We see him on various jobs but the one role that is shown throughout the film is pretending to be the missing father for a teenage girl named Mahiro Tanimoto. Their interactions in this fantasy provide ground for the moral quandries he feels which he voices between jobs.
The latter won the Prix du Jury in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival of that year. It stars Mariko Tsutsui who has been doing stellar work as seen in Jam (2018) and Antiporno (2016) and she returns here with a bonkers cast including Mikako Ichikawa (Rent-a-cat (2012)), Mitsuru Fukikoshi (Cold Fish (2011)) and two newbies both in NDJC 2019 films, Ren Sudo (Last Judgement) andMiyu Ogawa (Quiet Hide-and-Seek). This has awards potential as it lets Tsutsui off the leash and looks like it has decent direction but Fukada will have to present a reigned-in story! This plays at Locarno next month.
Synopsis: Ichiko (Mariko Tsutsui) is a visiting nurse who has earned the trust of her patients. She has been helping Motoko (Mikako Ichikawa) study for the purpose of becoming a care worker. Ichiko is the only person with whom Motoko is open with. One day, Motoko’s younger sister Saki (Miyu Ogawa) disappears. A week later Saki returns home unharmed, but the person arrested for her kidnapping is an unexpected person and Ichiko is suspected of being involved in the abduction. This causes Ichiko to collapse…
Veteran yakuza and chanbara movie director Sadao Nakajima came out of academia for one last hurrah behind the camera with this period drama.
Synopsis: Tajuro Kiyokawa (Kengo Kora) is a wandering ronin who has found himself washed up in Kyoto at the end of the Edo period. His neighbour is Otoyo (Mikako Tabe), an izakaya owner who has feelings for him. Tajuro Kiyokawa doesn’t care about her or much else. Not even his younger step brother Kazuma Kiyokawa (Ryo Kimura) who has followed him to Kyoto in the mistaken belief that Tajuro wants to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate. This rumour causes problems…
This is the second weekend of the decade and we’re all still here. I have been playing Resident Evil 2: Remake, a Christmas present from my mother and sister, and I’ve been having a blast. I got past Mr. X without dying – although he did punch me as I walked through a door to evade a licker. It’s very cinematic thanks to the moody lighting and brilliant level design and character animation. After getting to the sewer, I’ve shelved it for now because I have films to do. I watched the film Erica 38 and reviewed it for V-Cinema. I also wrote about the films playing at this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival and 10 films I hope to pick up in Japan this year.
Synopsis: Mizuki and Haruo are two students who find themselves sucked into a horrific string of deaths after the death of a friend and a brother respectively. The deaths all involve a heart attack visibly provoked by extreme fear and the victim’s eyes literally explode. They search for clues as to what is going on but when one potential source dies, all they have to work on is the name Shirai-san. Mamiya, a journalist, is also investigating and joins the two as they get sucked into a gory horror story.
Synopsis: The year is 2020 and the place is Japan but not as we know it for, after hosting the Tokyo Olympic games, the economy implodes and people’s living standards plummet and inflation soars. The government ratchets up the pressure on an already over-taxed and overworked citizenry by transforming the nation into a labour camp where a few parasitic oligarchs have all the money while the workers, the ones that produce value for companies, are exploited.
Okay, not too dissimilar from our current capitalist hellscape.
Kaiji, the ultimate gambler, finds himself in the underclass struggling to get by on a pittance and he is gradually filling with rage. When he discovers that his former underground labour camp boss, Otsuki, a fellow veteran in the illegal gambling realm, is the President of the powerful Teiai conglomerate, he is recruited to take part in new gambling activities which the oligarchs blow their money on. Can Kaiji turn his life around and wipe the smiles off the old men as he wipes the value from them? Let’s hope so! Eat the rich!
This anime is based on the manga by Hiroyuki Ohashi and the write up makes it sound good as “the film’s animation technique evolves as the story does, culminating in a rock ‘n’ roll spectacle for the ears and the eyes”.
The film won Best Feature Film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and a review over at the Japan Times has given it 5 out of 5!.
Synopsis: One summer’s day, three outsider high school students who haven’t touched an instrument in their lives decide to form a band to express their teenage angst and impress girls. Does it matter that Kenji and his friends have never played an instrument before? Of course not – he’s got a guitar at home and his friends have a bass and drums in theirs so in the true spirit of punk, with blind confidence and absolutely minimal effort they start to make friends and influence people.
King of Prism All Stars: Prism Show Best 10
KING OF PRISM ALL STARS プリズムショー☆ベストテン 「King of Prism All Stars: Purizumu Sho- Besuto Ten 」
Release Date: January 10th, 2020
Duration: 60 mins.
Director: Masakazu Hishida
Writer: Jou Aoba (Screenplay), Mai Matsuura (Original Concept)
Synopsis: A compilation movie based on the anime series where handsome boys train to be Prism Stars which involves singing, dancing and figure skating. Fans were asked to vote for the ten best moments from the show and these ten have been compiled and everything turned into a movie.
This is a youth story made by popular YouTubers based in Okazaki City, Aichi Prefecture. HiROKi is a YouTuber himself.
Synopsis: Masato is a high schooler in a small rural town. He lives with his mother and little sister at their family-run store. Shinpei is his childhood friend anda bit of a dreamer but he senses that a girl named Haruka likes Masato. Just as romance seems to be blossoming, a woman named Mizuki appears in town…
The Island of Giant Insects
巨蟲列島「Kyochu Retto」
Release Date: January 10th, 2020
Duration: 75 mins.
Director:Takeo Takahashi
Writer:Shigeru Morita (Screenplay), RED ICE, Shu Hirose, Yasutaka Fujimi (Original Creator)
Synopsis: Mutsumi Oribe and her classmates are in a plane on a school field trip but it crashes. The survivors drift onto an island dominated where there are giant insects. Once the humans set foot on shore, it’s “dinner time” for the bugs and it;s only Mutsumi’s knowledge of insects that can stop them all from being devoured…
Gekijouban ressha daikoushin 2020 dokidoki sugoro ku tsua
劇場版 れっしゃだいこうしん2020 ドキドキすごろくツア「Gekijouban ressha daikoushin 2020 dokidoki sugoro ku tsua」
Synopsis: This is a movie version of a popular series for kids which introduces trains from all over Japan. Everything is orchestrated by Dr. Tetsudo, who has a machine which allows you to see railroads all over the country just by rolling dice. Two children, Kenta-kun and Sumika-chan, will compete to determine which one can finish first. Kenta-kun goes to Tokyo and Sumika-chan goes to Kyushu to see a variety of trains from local limited express services to Shinkansen.
Synopsis: A documentary made to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the rapper SEAMO’s debut (wikipedia info). His career has featured some highs and lows and he goes into them in interviews…
Beyond the Blue
あの群青の向こうへ「Ano gunjou no mukou e」
Release Date: January 11th, 2020
Duration: 89 mins.
Director: Kenichiro Hiro
Writer:Kenichiro Hiro, (Script),
Starring: Haruka Imou, Jun Kiyama, Kaho Seto, Yukari Saito, Hitomi-chan,
Synopsis: Yuki has run away from home to head for Tokyo with a guy named Kagari. She has the ability to receive letters that come from the future but do they contain good news or bad news?
Synopsis: This film is about a veteran clothes designer named Yuji who couldn’t keep up with changing trends and he returns to his hometown where he rediscovers his passion for making clothes.
Inspired by true events, Erica 38 tells the story of a con-woman named Satoko Watabe who defrauds 50 billion yen from unsuspecting dupes in a pyramid scheme before finally being caught. The lead character, played by former pop idol Miyoko Asada, may have a silver tongue that can deceive others but in the end the biggest dupe turns out to be her.
Told in an unsentimental and unostentatious way, Erica 38 allows the audience to engage in an interesting character study where we see the rise and fall of Satoko Watabe (Miyoko Asada), a woman we are first introduced to as she is being arrested in Thailand where she has donned the persona of Erica, a 38-year-old Japanese expat. The narrative then uses the character of an investigative journalist interviewing people involved in her scam (and asking questions the audience will have) to initiate a series of nested flashbacks to tell us how she got to this point.
We see her evolving career in Tokyo, rising from a middle-aged hostess at a club to wooing roomfuls of people, many of whom are vulnerable, who are wowed by the fantasy of investing in schools in Cambodia. Through chance meetings with con artists who value her silver tongue, she learns to dress sharper, speak more eloquently and weave bigger dreams, thus fooling larger audiences and throughout it all shows little signs of guilt as she accrues wealth through lies.
A montage of fancy clothes, flash cars, facials, wads of cash stacked in a safe and expensive jewels wrapped around wrists, concisely tell her growing decadence powered by her mercenary behaviour. Less deftly told is the root of how she became so ruthless. The flashbacks reveal that she comes from a working-class milieu and has a broken family background, which possibly includes abuse by her father, but it never quite convinces. It is enough to show her career trajectory, her character traits like materialism and distrust which she later displays and so, when one fellow grifter tells her, “Money is far more dependable than people. The human heart is weak”, we understand why Satoko takes this advice to her own heart as she fleeces people convinced she is genuine.
Miyoko Asada, a pop idol who got her start in the 70s, really impresses as the heard-headed and hard-hearted Satoko, an air of geniality and brightness that masks the indifference she can display for the people she betrays even as they plead and beg for their money back and reveal the extent of their woes. The acting of the supporting cast borders just on the right side of melodrama to be taken seriously as we get invested in their terror and fury and marvel at the implacable Satoko, a picture of innocence. Asada also has a skill for showing and hiding vulnerability and reveals it when she dares to admit love, another way to count the things she hasn’t got, and allows herself to be blinded by it. The film takes on a little tragic hue in this regard as we see her inability to fully trust another person and defensively recoil from it but still want to be sucked into the emotion.
Perhaps the only person loyal to Satoko is her mother. Played by Kirin Kiki (in her last acting role), she displays a hard-won resignation to life, something her daughter finally adopts as the end comes for her and she finds she can no longer hide behind a false smile as she has to admit that as much as she has fooled others with elaborate dreams, by allowing herself to get wrapped up in her decadent fantasies and not confront her worst traits and bitter past, she is the biggest fool. As the narrative closes, the journalist gives Satoko one last myth to hold on to although it is a bittersweet lies in itself.
My review of Erica 38 was first published on VCinema on January 09th.
Hirokazu Kore-eda made Distance after he became interested in the disciples of Aum Shinrikyo, the group which committed the Tokyo subway sarin attack¹. He wanted to comment on how everyone in society could be responsible for it in some way. In so doing, he strikes at a universal fear surely felt by everyone which is that perhaps those who should be the closest to us are sometimes the ones furthest away.
This idea of distance is given to us through the story of a group of people who are ostensibly disconnected from each other but each has a deep personal connection to a terrorist incident described at the start of the film by a radio announcer.
We are introduced to each character in brief snippets as the film intercuts scenes of their daily lives. First, there is Kiyoka Yamamoto (Yui Natsukawa), a nice teacher at a high school and she has a son who is staying with her father. Minoru Kai (Susumu Terajima) is a reliable salaryman for a construction company and he has a young family. Atsushi Mizuhara (Arata) is a flower shop worker who kindly visits an old man in a hospital. Then there is the gregarious Masaru Enoki (Yusuke Iseya) who we see hanging out with his bubbly girlfriend in the lively streets of Shibuya. He is planning a trip. This trip will unite these characters as they each head out of Tokyo to a lake in a forest in a remote region.
As they travel together, they talk and slowly get to know each other on a surface level. We discover they are related to members of the cult that sabotaged Tokyo’s water supply, something which resulted in the deaths of hundreds. These cult members then committed suicide and had their ashes scattered by the lake. It is the anniversary of the attack, and these four people are heading to the lake to remember them. When they arrive, they meet a former member of the cult, Koichi Sakata (Tadanobu Asano), who had fled during the incident. He keeps his distance from the four from Tokyo but is forced to help them when they find their vehicles they travelled into the forest in have disappeared.
Although a contrived way to bottle these characters up, it works because dusk is approaching and so is heavy rain and they need shelter so Sakata leads them to the cult’s old headquarters, a cabin where they spend the night talking. What they talk about, usually in pairs with Sakata who serves as a confessor of sorts, is the moment when their loved ones told them they were joining the cult and family ties rupture. The film utilises flashbacks with each conversation where the distance between the quartet at the cabin and those who committed mass murder is revealed.
We see scenes such as Kiyoka’s husband (Kenichi Endo) and Enoki’s brother (Kanji Tsuda) explaining feelings of alienation from society and frustration with archetypal family structures. They have struggled to fit into socially prescribed roles and sought family connection with a cult which provided mental comfort.
For those left behind and fully comfortable with conventionality, their reactions range from violent to stupefied to wishy-washy as they believably deal with the shock of the break in relationship they ignored or missed and struggle to comprehend the gap and, eventually, give up on people clearly in need of help, preferring distance to maintain order in their lives. Their failing is pointedly brought out in police interviews where detectives incredulously ask, why they didn’t see anything and they can only offer excuses.
Thematically, it fits Kore-eda’s oeuvre in keeping with his interest in family ties and hits the common fear that a relative could suddenly turn around and be strangers. How does one react? Hopefully by not giving up or rejecting as the characters here do. Kore-eda does maintain sympathy with the family members who are struggling to comprehend things and shows how they, too, are alienated and feel distance from others.
Kore-eda uses lighting and visual framing to build on the narrative, the theme of isolation and distance, and the character’s emotional state.
Getting across the distance these characters face is the camerawork which often frames them singularly even if they are in a conversation with others. When they are physically close to people, their proximity is less important than the line of travel they are engaged in which is away from others, or through crowds which separate around them. Characters often look off in different directions when conversing and generally eye-contact is avoided. Everyone appears to be separated from a loved one by an object such as a table or netting for a baseball diamond, and Kiyoka from her son staying with her father. We recognise that the quartet who failed to see the distance the distance between themselves and the cultists are struggling with their own isolation now.
Even if not a lot appears to be happening, weighty emotions are delivered with cinematography and naturalistic acting from the cast. According to an interview, the cast were given scenarios for their characters and their interactions and allowed to improvise and build up their own chemistry which contains hesitancy and the sort of embarrassed and aggravated confessions and confrontations and melancholy but also hope because they can smile at the end and they can try to narrow the distance between themselves and the loved ones still in their lives.
Distance is mysterious, not suspenseful. Quiet and naturalistic in execution, as conversations take precedent, with poetic visuals left for the ending. With scenes shot in such a specific way that the atmosphere soon takes over, we imbibe on world’s of loneliness and isolation felt by the cultists who have drifted away from loved ones and it is chilling.
¹ Taken from the Cannes interview he gave which is linked on Wikipedia
This week, I’ve been diligently writing reviews and prepping them as well as getting ready for a Japanese film festival. I posted my reviews for Erica 38 and the Hirokazu Koreeda film Distance.
What is released this weekend in Japan?
A whole lot of films. Thankfully, a lot were played at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2019 or are older films so I could just copy and paste from past articles I wrote!
Synopsis:The rapper SEEDA’s 2006 album Flowers and Rain forms the basis of this work about a young man’s travails. You can hear the SEEDA’s work on this webpage dedicated to Japanese hip-hop. Rising stars Sho Kasamatsu and Ayaka Onishi (Randen) take the lead roles.
The Horse Thieves. Roads of Time
オルジャスの白い馬「Oruhasu no Shiroi Uma」
Release Date: January 18th, 2020
Duration: 81 mins.
Director: Yerlan Nurmukhambetov, Lisa Takeba
Writer: Yerlan Nurmukhambetov (Screenplay),
Starring: Dulyga Akmolda, Madi Minaidarov, Mirai Moriyama, Samal Yeslyamova,
This road movie/western is a co-production between Kazakhstan/Japan and brought to the big screen via Tokyo New Cinema. It is the work of two directors, Yerlan Nurmukhambetov who won the New Currents Award in Busan International Film Festival 2015, and Lisa Takeba. Yes, that Lisa Takeba with the fierce imagination who made The Pinkie (2014) and Haruko’s Paranormal Laboratory (2015). In his first overseas role, Mirai Moriyama (The Drudgery Train) takes one of the lead characters amongst a predominantly Kazakh cast.
It looks like an ambitious and fresh new movie production for Japan as it follows To the Ends of the Earth to new territories and stories.
Synopsis: We are in the plains of the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, a world where horse thieves operate under vast skies and on huge grass plains. A family man is murdered by those thieves as he heads to a town market to sell his horses. This leaves his wife a widow and his children fatherless. The village comes together to help the wife hold the man’s funeral and then the wife decides to return to her family with her children. Then, another man who vanished from her life eight years ago appears and helps the woman move and takes one of the children, the son, under his wing, teaching him how to ride horses. The son of the wife resembles that man. The man and the boy go out on horseback together and track down the horse thieves…
Tokyo Paralympics: Festival of Love and Glory
東京パラリンピック 愛と栄光の祭典「Tokyo Pararinpikku Ai to Eiko no Saiten」
Synopsis:This documentary was shot during the 1964 Tokyo Paralympics and looks at the conditions faced by the physically disabled in Japan at the time. Many of the athletes were affected by World War II, some returning from the battlefields as wounded soldiers, and this was seen as a way to rehabilitate them. The then Crown Prince Akihito and Crown Princess Michiko — now former emperor and former empress — are seen with them.
Bad Poetry Tokyo is a stunning human drama with a tone reminiscent of The Light Shines Only There (2014). It is lead by a powerful performance from Shuna Iijima who has to deal with heavy issues and does so with a grace that is breathtaking. Her performance won her the Best Actress award at the 2018 Osaka Asian Film Festival and I can tell you now that it will keep you riveted to the screen. Here’s my review of the film and an interview with the director and cast. Highly recommended.
Synopsis: Jun Fujita is 30 years old. She majored in English at Tokyo University. That is the lie she tells people when she applies for acting jobs. In reality, she works as a hostess at a shady club. Life hasn’t turned out the way she wanted when she escaped home back in Nagano Prefecture five years ago. Still, she dreams of being an actress and is about to touch her dream when she is betrayed by her lover and things go wrong at the club. Broken and made savage by the experience, she heads back to her sleepy hometown in the countryside to lick her wounds. Things haven’t changed much there and she reconnects with an old flame but there are ugly truths about her past that lurk beneath the surface …
Mamoru Hosoda brings a near-future sci-fi romance title set in Ueda in Nagano Prefecture which is close to the director’s birthplace. It earned him the Japanese Academy Award for Animation of the Year in 2010 with its action, romance and family values. It has been re-released as a tenth anniversary screening and it will be a 4DX experience.
Synopsis:Kenji Koiso is a 17-year-old maths genius and part-time moderator for the world of OZ, a globally popular online world which many people use to regulate aspects of their daily lives from shopping to social media.One summer, he is invited by his secret crush Natsuki on a summer trip to Nagano where he will stay at her family’s estate. They are preparing for her great-grandmother’s 90th birthday but he suddenly receives a mysterious, coded message on his cell phone from an unknown sender who challenges him to solve it but his maths skills might just put the world in danger…
Complicity
コンプリシティ優しい共犯 「Konpurishitei Yasashii Kyouhan」
Release Date: January 17th, 2020
Duration: 116 mins.
Director: Kei Chikaura
Writer: Kei Chikaura (Screenplay),
Starring:Yulai Lu, Tatsuya Fuji, Sayo Akasaka, Kio Matsumoto, Fusako Urabe,
This China-Japan co-production seems to be a continuation of the director’s short film Signaturewhich also stars Yulai Lu. That short featured him playing a Chinese immigrant wandering around Shibuya.
Synopsis:A Chinese man named Chen Liang (Lu Yulai) left China and his ill mother and elderly grandmother to livein Japan. He wanted to escape his responsibilities and have a new life but he finds himself experiencing the hardships that come with living illegally in Japan but it looks like things might change for the better when he takes a phone call meant for someone else and accepts a job at a traditional Japanese soba restaurant run by an elderly chef (Tatsuya Fuji). He takes to learning the art of soba-preparation, however, his illegal status could put things in jeopardy.
Mellow
Release Date: January 17th, 2020
Duration: 106 mins.
Director:Rikiya Imaizumi
Writer:Rikiya Imaizumi(Script)
Starring: Kei Tanaka, Sae Okazaki, Sumire, Sara Shida, Rie Tomosaka,
Synopsis: Seiichi Natsume (Kei Tanaka) and his neighbour Kiho/Natsume (Sae Okazaki) are both young people who own businesses but have different attitudes; Seiichi loves working as a florist while Kiho inherited the ramen restaurant and plans on closing it. Both are single and both begin to influence each other…
A film split between past and present where a novelist reminisces about his love for a dead woman after meeting her sister.
Synopsis: Yuri Kishibeno (Takako Matsu) is a married housewife with two children. When she attends her sister’s funeral she meets her niece Ayumi (Suzu Hirose) for the first time in many years. Ayumi has grown up a lot but finds it hard to accept her mother’s death and, because of this, she can’t open a letter left behind by her mother. Yuri takes on the task of informing her sister’s friends and acquaintances about her death. At one gathering, she is mistaken for her sister and Yuri meets her first love Kyoshiro Otosaka (Masaharu Fukuyama), a failed novelist, she starts a snail-mail correspondence where she talks about her real marriage and he sends her messages about his love. These messages fall into Ayumi’s hands…
Synopsis: Ryoichi Yoshimori (Ryosuke Yamada) and his girlfriend Kyoko Sawada (Misako Renbutsu) are on the path to wedded bliss when she suddenly disappears. She reappears several days later but Kyoko does not remember him. Lately, there have been rumours that a person named Kiokuya erases people’s memories and Ryoichi suspects that Kyoko is a victim. Ryoichi talks to a lawyer named Chiaki Takaharu (Kuranosuke Sasaki) and gets help from childhood friend Maki Kawai (Kyoko Yoshine) as he searches for the truth.
Synopsis: Shingo Kawasaki is a skilled carpenter and skilled in understanding people. He has a wife and child and they live happily together. He takes an interest in an insurance company saleswoman named Mei Ikeda. She is a single mother living with her son. Kawasaki figures he can be something of a father figure and support Mei by building a house for them but when Mei’s ex appears…
Synopsis from IMDB:Failed musician Todo meets and falls for cute street musician Kuryu who – as it turns out – is being followed not only by a journalist, terrorists, and the police, but even by the Japanese Prime Minister himself. While trying to find out what dangerous secret Kuryu is hiding, Todo lands in the middle of a vortex of power and intrigue, that threatens to destroy not only his own life but the lives of millions of people.
Synopsis: When the tectonic plates around Japan shifted, lots of land was submerged. 100 years ago later, Japan has Marine Cities that are connected by sea-lanes and women have flocked to maritime jobs including in defence hence the creation of the BLUE MERMAIDS, the naval unit every female student wants to hoin! This is the story of Akeno Misaki and Moeka China who enrol in a marine high school in Yokosuka, along with other girls who share their goal of “BECOMING A BLUE MERMAID.”
Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul
劇場版メイドインアビス 深き魂の黎明「Gekijouban Meido In Abisu Fukaki Tamashii no Reimei」
Release Date: January 17th, 2020
Duration: 105 mins.
Director: Masayuki Kojima,
Writer:Hideyuki Kurata(Script/Original Creator)
Starring: Mariya Ise (Regu), Miyu Tomita (Riko), Shiori Izawa (Nanachi), Inori Minase (Prushka), Toshiyuki Morikawa (Bondrewd)
Synopsis: Riko and Reg are continuing to adventure in the Abyss and have a new friend named Nanachi. They have reached the fifth layer, the Sea of Corpses, where the mysterious Bondrewd, a legendary White Whistle, lurks and he has a history with Nanachi…
Synopsis: One day, near a station, Mitsuru witnessed a man named Takahashi drop to the ground in tears while holding a phone. The people around them passed by trying to avoid the scene and being inconvenienced. Mitsuru acted the same way. That memory from a year ago haunts him as he thinks about his own father…
Neko Kaeru Cat’s Home
猫、かえる Cat’s Home「Neko, Kaeru Cat’s Home」
Release Date: January 18th, 2020
Duration: 20 mins.
Director:Shinobu Imao
Writer:Shinobu Imao(Script)
Starring: Serena Motola, Makoto Shinada, Manaka Kinoshita, Takahiro Ono
Synopsis: A young woman goes to her ex-boyfriend’s place to pick up her cat Eve after he becomes allergic to cats. However, the feline makes an escape…
A late show at Cinema Rosa in Ikembukuro will screen a number of indie shorts by Mutsumi Sato and the trailers here are the only ones that I could find:
Synopsis: A woman who lives together with her unemployed boyfriend and finds that their relationship breaks down since she does all the work while he lazes around. When she meets a man who claims to be a pimp, she finds her attention switches to him because of his unique character and flirtiness.
Nothing binds people together as tightly as family ties and those ties can hurt when they really bite into you, something which the characters in this drama experience when an old man moves in with his daughter and her boyfriend in their small apartment. It may be a cramped space but a wide range of issues are raised as these three try to learn to live together.
In a perfect example of the saying, “two’s company, three’s a crowd,” this sometimes sweetly comic but mostly wry relationship drama centres on Aya (Juri Ueno), a 34-year-old woman who has a pretty simple life. She works part-time at a book store and lives with her 54-year-old boyfriend Mr. Ito (Lily Franky). He also has a part-time job, working at a school cafeteria. The two have something of a carefree existence with few responsibilities other than making each other happy and watering the plants outside their apartment somewhere in Tokyo. Their chilled-out existence is disrupted when her cranky 74-year-old father (Tatsuya Fuji) moves in without warning after driving Aya’s older-brother Kiyoshi (Tomoharu Hasegawa) and sister-in-law Ririko (Sei Ando) up the wall with his domineering ways. He’s not that impressed with Aya’s laid-back lifestyle or his daughter having a boyfriend who is about to hit 60 and he lets them know it in every conversation and through his passive-aggressive attitude.
At first glance, he is a typical grumpy old man moaning about how youngsters don’t live in a traditional way and it gives the film its dramatic and comedic contours as Aya and her father clash.
The film looks at differences between the baby-boomer generation who benefited from the financial good times experienced by Aya’s parents, and those who grew up in the lost-decade when the economy tanked. Aya’s responses and lifestyle say a lot about the breakdown of traditional employment and family structures in Japan as people reaching middle-age or already there, like Aya and Mr Ito, scramble into part-time work due to the lack of full-time employment available. With finances able to accommodate the two comfortably, it is easy to imagine Aya and Mr. Ito choosing to be happy over being parents or struggling to compete with new generations of university grads for better-paying work.
Perhaps the reason we are never given Aya’s father’s name and he is only referred to as “father” is to make him symbolic of the older generation.
Aya finds herself bombarded with questions about her life with Mr Ito, revealing ingrained gender roles and some legitimate worries about Ito’s family background and the social risk of Ito grooming Aya to be his carer which will leave her alone when she is elderly.
Whatever the case, Aya’s responses are carefree, a shrug of the shoulders or a casual, “I don’t know”. She is taking it too lightly and has no problem which obviously drives her uptight father into irritation so he blusters all the more.
“I’m aware of how I’m living my life.”
While Aya’s father is really unbearable in some of his behaviour, the film doesn’t shy away from criticising his children who are seen plotting with how to deal with their father as if he is an inconvenience. For Kiyoshi, palming him off to others is to give his family, who are working hard to compete in society, a break. The toll the father having wrought on others being humorously shown through Ririko’s horrified reactions to the sight of him. Aya just wants to live carefree. Filial piety is that small tug that keeps the kids connected to the old man.
What makes the film funny and even a little daring is how Aya reveals a surprising selfishness and ruthlessness to her character in her dealings with her father. She wants to retain her comfortable life and her father is an oppressive presence. Yuki Tanada’s low-key direction focuses mostly on Aya’s point-of-view and picks out Juri Ueno’s face as she runs through a gamut of emotions from frustration to sadness and regret. The most interesting looks are the devious ones that accompany the acerbic comments Aya has about the old man, the glimpses of callousness and disrespect. The film offers criticism of people who show such selfishness to others but it is refreshing to see such glimpses of meanness from her in an age where baby boomers refuse to accept the problems their actions have wrought and it is a little satisfying to see how she rejects gender and societal roles. Ueno also has a beautiful childishness to her which reveals she hasn’t quite grown up yet.
Likewise Tatsuya Fuji does a great job being a grump through his casual cruelty and inability to soften his own behaviour to others. He does get moments to show his humanity when he talks about his days as a teacher and shows kindness but his childish stubbornness leads to many an impasse which is only broken when he tries to recapture his youth by retreating back into his own past. The film is equally as critical of him as it is of Aya by showing his intransigence and the story lets the audience know that the elderly have to allow for change and respect others as well.
To make sure it all works, Lily Franky’s character, Mr Ito, acts as a pivot for the children and their father. Less in thrall to the family unit, his distance from their history allows a frankness and clear-eyed decisions that act as a compromise between two opposite parties. Franky imbues his character with his trademark laid-back energy and experience that convinces audiences he’s happy bobbing along the surface of society as a part-time worker and it also serves to help him act as a negotiator for the other characters who he connects with in surprising ways.
Although the film flirts with sentimentality, it never goes there because nobody is particularly loveable. That written, they are sometimes easy to relate to and sympathise with, making this an excellent character-driven story with a lot of interesting social commentary on the interaction between generations and changes in how people live. As these things shift about in conversations, the film zeroes in on the most important thing in life: family and how it is important for everyone, young and old, to understand and empathise with each other.
A possible tag line for this film could be, “a family that embezzles together, stays together”, such is the content of this film which shows a day in the life of a greedy family as they swindle from subjects in their social circle. Ten actors, one location, and a narrative that takes place over 24 hours, Graceful Brute (1962) is a masterful black comedy that critiques the changing morals of Japanese people during the economic miracle of the post-war years.
The film almost exclusively takes place in the fifth floor apartment of the Maeda’s. They live in a danchi (housing complex) designed by Kunio Maekawa¹, the sort of forward-thinking utilitarian building that was meant to serve every need of its residents and promote community and harmony but the values of the Maeda’s are far from these ideals. They seem to be a stable family unit of two conservative parents (who wear kimono and listen to traditional music) and their hip son and daughter (out on the town in Ginza’s bars)but as the narrative unfolds we see the depth of their duplicity, selfishness, and materialistic behaviour which unites them. They are a product of the age.
As the opening credits role we see suspicious activity. The father Tokizo (Yunosuke Ito) and mother Yoshino (Hisano Yamaoka) hurriedly hide all signs of wealth such as the television, an Impressionist portrait by Renoir, a sofa, and they even go so far as to replace things from the table cloths and ashtrays to their kimono with cheaper alternatives. They certainly won’t be opening the cupboards which are stuffed with fancy food and drink. This is in preparation for various run-ins with people their children have defrauded money from.
The son, Minoru (Manamitsu Kawabata), has embezzled millions of yen from his employer at the Highlight Pro Agency, a talent outfit run by Katori (Hideo Takamatsu).
The daughter, Tomoko (Yuko Hamada), has effectively been pimped by her own father to be the young mistress of a hack author named Yoshizawa (Kyu Sazanka).
It was he who set up the apartment and its luxurious furnishings to be solely used by Tomoko and himself as a love nest but his new mistress moved the rest of her family in. He has since become a bank for the father and the cavalier Minoru has also embezzled money from him.
Both Yoshizawa and Katori will repeatedly visit the Maeda’s and try to get their money back, the writer eager to cut ties and Katori, desperate to avoid an accounting scandal, will bring a talentless jazz singer and his accountant, a widow and single-mother named Yukie Mitani (Ayako Wakao), to the apartment to track down the errant young man and the money. The elder Maeda’s field these visitors without a problem, appearing humble and apologetic until they get them out of the door and then they reveal their true faces: hypocritical parasites living off the ill-gotten gains of their children and advising them on how to get more. Their audaciousness and hypocrisy is shocking. It is funny.
If these poor souls lured into the Maeda’s web seem sympathetic we soon learn that they are equally duplicitous and greedy. Katori peddles questionable “talent” as exemplified by the preening and egotistical singer in his entourage and he has dodgy business dealings while Yoshizawa uses Tomoko as material for lurid novels. Other sins are revealed, the most outrageous twists coming from Mitani who turns out not to be so vulnerable and more a calculating lady using her feminine charms and position as a woman in a patriarchal society to play others in order to get ahead.
The comedy comes from the breathtaking fakeness of everything and the audacious levels of greed from everybody. The veneer of respectable behaviour is stripped away and reapplied at a moments notice by passion, a constant desire for money, self-preservation and tactical negotiations and it happens often during the many twists and turns of the plot as each character tries to keep their individual bets from going bust and, as the stakes get raised higher and higher and those bets look to have legal pitfalls, things reach immoral highs where life is on the line.
Everyone on the cast rises to the occasion brilliantly, the actors playing the Maeda’s switching between formal and contrite behaviour to greedy and grasping in the next second, their victims from righteous indignation to creeping and crawling. Even the Renoir turns out to be fake. Everyone works in perfect synchronicity especially in dialogue where their lines follow on from and overlap each other but their greed and single-mindedness unites them in one chorus. Ayako Wakao is a particular highlight as she turns in a chilling performance of duplicity, that makes even the Maeda’s gasp as she is revealed as a determined woman who played all of the characters off against each other using her beauty and intelligence to savagely wrong-foot all opposition.
Writer Kaneto Shindo and director Yuzo Kawashima take glee in dragging out the indignities and duplicities but it also feels like a criticism of people living in an age of rapid industrialisation. Perhaps the much vaunted promise of capitalism and Westernisation has just been a gaudy trap that brings out the worst in people, makes them parasitic hustlers. This feels like it could have been a stageplay with it being so performance-centric and dialogue-driven but it started life as a film first before being adapted for the stage at least three times.
The small apartment becomes a battleground for this family as people try to get their money back. It is one set and yet it feels cinematic as the camera moves around the rooms along with the characters, peeking in on them, peering around corners, sometimes there is an overhead shot that looks directly down on people and one shot looks directly up through the floor so the space is wider than expected.
Indeed, there are some sequences and elements that only cinema can achieve. Certain characters have internal monologue sequences where they disappear into a white tunnel which has a staircase which they descend and ascend as they switch positions in their negotiations and characters achieve goals or face losing everything. The defining moment is, perhaps, a sequence which brings the narrative to a stop when Tokizo reminds his family of the poverty that they have escaped and want to avoid. It is a stirring monologue which describes a poverty that “sets itself into the bones” and we feel how much this has scarred people as close-ups on each of the actors who remain frozen allow us to study their faces as Tokizo’s stern voice reminds everyone that not so long back they, and by extension Japan, were crawling out of the ruins of war. Pretty good reasons to be money-grubbers, perhaps.
