Before Anyone Else [short film]
Release Date: 2023
Duration: 20 mins.
Director: Tetsuya Mariko
Writer: Gregory Collins, Tetsuya Mariko (Screenplay),
Starring: Akiyo Komatsu (Jimmy), Chloe Skoczen (Lex), Kenzo Yeung (Kai), Diego Torrado (Theo), Bridget Painter (Magda)
Before Anyone Else is a Japanese-American co-production directed by Tetsuya Mariko. Perhaps best known in the West for portraits of disaffected Japanese youth in Destruction Babies and From Miyamoto to You, his shift to an American setting is a surprise but like those films, Before Anyone Else deals with similar themes of abuse, trauma, and dispossessed people in indifferent societies.
The story concerns a couple, Jimmy (Akiyo Komatsu) and Lex (Chloe Skoczen). Both are skateboarders scraping by in the world as small-time thieves. After knocking over a pawn shop, they happen across an abandoned car with a pistol in the glove compartment and a child in the back. Jimmy claims both, much to Lex’s consternation and the audience’s sense of peril as the principle of Chekhov’s gun comes into play.
While a familiar setup, the story is told very well. The screenplay smoothly introduces the world of the characters and slips easily into rising action, amidst which, it seeds further exposition and character details via subtle but illuminating dialogue between Jimmy, Lex, and a coterie of friends. This skilful layering of information occurs in a way that feel real while it also builds out hints of past experiences of abuse to explain character motivation and foreshadow developments that should have viewers in the grip of growing tension.
What really sells the drama and the fleshing out of the characters is that the acting is very naturalistic. The cast take the writing and imbue it with so many shades of emotions in such a way that it is engrossing viewing to ride the changes in the actor’s moods. Testiness when talking about mothers, irritation over physical intimacy, a finger on the gun’s trigger when it is waved about, alternating disdain and joy over the boy that Jimmy and Lex lay their hands on. All of these details are vividly conveyed by the cast for spikes in dramatic intrigue and ensure that the story developments feel like they grow organically until they coalesce into a strong finale that feels fatefully inevitable rather than contrived. Akiyo Komatsu is especially good as Jimmy, a ball of cockiness at times and hopeless at others, the warmth that he shows the boy and sudden bouts of panic humanises what might be an archetype. Thus, we begin to care while trying to figure him out.
Bringing these rough and ready lives to the screen are top notch technical aspects.
Sharp sound design by Hiroaki Kanachi allows the din of urban life to offer an atmospheric soundscape and the bark of a gun to have a devastating effect that wrenches a viewer into a sensation of shock. Cinematography by Yasuyuki Sasaki (The Fish Tale (2022), Aristocrats (2020), Asako I & II (2018), Touching the Skin of Eeriness (2013) and Destruction Babies) delivers a distinctive grainy texture that, along with faded colours and urban sets – Jimmy’s warehouse apartment of exposed brick and power mains – gets across the harsh surroundings of the characters that you can almost smell the car exhaust fumes and feel the grit and grime on the street, the brush of scrub on vacant lots. There are bravura camera moves and use of activity on the screen to keep the whole thing flowing and exciting, details filling the screen while adding visual poetry. Those silky smooth dolly shots trailing the skateboarders through an underpass as leaves tumble down – just an exquisite moment that is beautiful while also descriptive of the environment.
Taken all together, even if the set up seems familiar, the atmosphere is so rich that the story becomes compelling and the constant delivery of information, both visually, through acting and location, and through the dialogue is sleek. The film has the ring of truth, as if we are watching lives adrift. Thus, all the way, we feel we’re watching real people confronting a crisis initiated by the inciting incident of finding an abandoned child, something torn from the headlines rather than something theatrically constructed and it becomes an emotionally involving story that keeps our eyes rooted on the screen to see how it ends.
This short is being developed into a feature and based on the quality of the original work, the feature film is a project that people should keep their eye on.
Before Anyone Else played as part of the Shorts 1: City & State – Revelations slate of short films at the Chicago International Film Festival 2023.
In-Person Screenings:
Oct 14 at 13:30 at Chicago History Museum;
Oct 22 at 13:30pm at AMC NEWCITY, Screen 13 – producer Yuki Sakamoto Solomon was present for this screening;
Virtual Screening:
This was part of a program that was available to stream from October 16 at 12:00 to October 22 at 23:59.