遠吠え 「Toboe」
Release Date: April 16th, 2022
Duration: 86 mins.
Director: Sheikh M Haris
Writer: Sheikh M Haris (Screenplay),
Starring: Ichiro Hashimoto, Yukino Takahashi, Ryoma Ikegami, Sanae Kotani, Takahiro Ono,
There is no rule stating that a film has to have a hero who is successful or likeable. Heck, there doesn’t have to be a hero. Such is the case with Howling by Sheikh M Haris, a bleakly funny tragicomedy of disaffected and marginalised characters who seek a “hero” or to become one as they struggle to find a way out of their bleak lives.
Our main protag is Ryuji (Ichiro Hashimoto), a 40-year-old man who, when we first meet him, is sexually harassing one of the part-timers who works with him at a karaoke parlour. Appropriately, he gets fired for his actions but as he explains to a job interviewer a couple of scenes down the line, his firing was all about appearances as he glosses over the reality of his own behaviour. “The world is tough for middle-aged men,” he insists.
Right from the get-go, it is clear that he is the type of guy who is self-deluded and that he lacks the ability to reflect upon himself, and that he blames others and society for his own faults. He just needs a chance, that mythical movie-inspired single shot that will allow him to get money and a girl and prove he is more than a middle-aged loser.
Well, Ryuji gets his chance to turn things around, two in fact, as he receives an invitation to a junior high school reunion where he will see his first love, Chisato (Sanae Kotani), and when he gets an offer of a date from Akane (Yukino Takahashi), a beautiful 20-year-old student he met on a dating app who is the first woman to respond to his messages. It all proves too good to be true but while his fantasies of getting a moteki moment are burst as he discovers both women are in even more desperate circumstances than he is, an opportunity still presents itself as they both see him as their hero who will help them out. All he needs to do is bump off Chisato’s husband and Akane’s father – two very bad guys who are making their lives miserable.
You can see Ryuji’s line of thinking – if society won’t give him a legitimate chance to change his life, crime will and he will get two beautiful women in the process. Of course, what follows becomes farcical, a character study of a self-deluded man meeting reality because, despite being given the tools of 10 million yen and a gun by Akane, he isn’t up to the job as his cowardice and a lack of self-determination throw cold water over his fantasies and so when the chance presents itself, he botches everything and no amount of prancing around with the gun pretending to shoot people can help him.
What good is a movie-like comeback scenario like this when a person’s fundamental character is flawed?
In asking and answering such a question, the film revels finds sardonic humour in watching a flawed ordinary guy like Ryuji, with his sad-smile and shogenai attitude to his shortcomings, reckoning with the reality of inflicting bodily harm and coming up short until the ending where he finally proves what he is worth but ironically in a hopeless and self-destructive way. By this point, as things get really nasty, the audience will already be primed for an absurd finale based on Ryuji’s history of misconceived and self-deluded behaviour backfiring.
While the deconstruction of the main character is interesting, the two women who sought his help, who read manga about heroes and talk about super powers, find him to be a disappointment are offered an interesting route of having to take matters into their own hands which means the film gives a certain life to the phrase, “men believe in fantasy, women in action.”
Beyond the writing and acting, which is uniformly good, the film has excellent use of locations that further the darkness of the story, from the concrete overpasses and their incessant traffic that almost overpowers conversations, to bleak windswept collection of scrub that makes up the riverside spots that Ryuji retreats to in order to act out his fantasies. This particular location also offers views of the tower-block that houses the women who hold sway over Ryuji’s future and a smooth match-cut of the building to an ornament in the lobby leads to neat transitions into that sterile and silent space marked out by greys and blacks, an uninviting place to live. Indeed, when it comes to night-time shots of the interiors, the characters are shown as small figures trapped in their surroundings, mirroring so much how they are trapped in desperate circumstances and howling to each other to get free. Sheikh M Haris finds the perfect way to frame the actors in a way not too distant from a Frank Miller neo-noir but just populated by realistic waifs and strays of Japanese society as they act out a black comedy of the disadvantaged and misguided.