A girl with a chronic illness becomes fixated on a traumatised classmate in Akihiko Shiota’s meditation on the self-destructive effects of obsessive love, The World of You (麻希のいる世界, Maki no iru Sekai) . It is not, however, the heroine that primarily experiences them, as her own romantic obsession is in one sense a purer love, but in another is a way of making her mark on the world before her short life comes to an end.
Yuki (Yuzumi Shintani) spots Maki (Marin Hidaka) leaving a local shack and locking the door behind her preceded by a shady-looking young man. She later recounts that she once stayed in this same shack for three days after running away from home following her parents’ divorce which she thinks her illness may partly have been responsible for her. The shack represents different things for each of them, but is also a space of their otherness and isolation from which neither of the girls is able to escape. It’s clear that Yuki’s growing obsession with Maki who is ostracised at school and resented by all is romantic, yet Maki appears to reject her attentions and reminds her she’s the type of girl who sleeps with guys.
Yuki sighs and she says knows as if she’s already resigned herself to the impossibility of her romantic desires being fulfilled, but Yuki continues to behave flirtatiously and otherwise uses the desire she knows Yuki feels for her as a means to manipulate her. Even so, on some level, she too has genuine feelings for Yuki and repeatedly tries to push her away in fear that she will only cause her trouble and pain. She tells her that her father is a convicted paedophile, which is why she is shunned by the local community. Though people are sympathetic at first, they often come to reject and resent her which is why she alternately responds to and then refuses Yuki’s insistence on connection. Though she never says so, her behaviour hints her father may have abused her too or at least that was she sexualised at an early age now and has a self-destructive attitude to sex in which she engages in potentially dangerous relationships with older men and uses her desirability to manipulate her male classmates.
Among them is Yusuke (Airu Kubozuka), who has a one-sided crush on Yuki that she continually rejects but he seemingly cannot take no for an answer. The situation between them is further complicated in that Yusuke’s father is also Yuki’s doctor. After her parents’ divorce, Yusuke’s father entered an affair with Yuki’s mother and eventually left his wife for her, breaking up their family. It’s already a messy situation, though Yusuke’s obsessive love is seemingly more possessive, whereas Yuki’s has taken on a passive quality. She does not really expect that Maki will ever return her feelings and seems to be aware that she uses them to manipulate her, but makes it her remaining life’s purpose to ensure that Maki’s musical talent is appreciated by the wider world.
In some senses it’s a classic tale of an incredibly toxic love triangle in which Maki plays off both Yusuke and Yuki though may not actually care for either them as all romantic desires are effectively processed through her. Each of the teens is unfairly made to pay for the sins of their parents and effectively left without proper guidance or more positive examples of healthy romantic relationships. Though they all lose something, Yuki’s loss of her voice is especially ironic given that she’d barely talked to begin with but had bared her soul to Yuki who is then in fact reborn, possibly as the “even more wonderful Maki” that Yuki hoped she be though she no longer remembers her. Nevertheless is there is something that seems more hopeful in Yuki’s insistence that they will meet again when pitted against Yusuke’s repeated claims that he knows Yuki will come to love him eventually, especially considering the destructive actions they ultimately lead him to. Yuki’s love, meanwhile, is only self-destructive or in its way life giving in allowing her to sacrifice herself for the world that has Maki in it but that she may never see.
A latish entry in post-millennial cyber thrillers, Corey Yuen’s So Close (夕陽天使) finds two hit women sisters safeguarding next generation technology in keeping it out of the hands of corrupt businessmen who in fact murdered their father to get it. They claim he always intended to gift his all-powerful mass surveillance tool to the police, which either seems politically uncomfortable or incredibly naive, but have been using it themselves to earn their keep as killers for hire albeit justifying themselves in insisting on the moral bankruptcy of their targets.
In this case, that would be Chow Lui (Shek Sau) who according to “Computer Angel” made his “evil fortune” through drug smuggling. Infinitely smug, Chow thinks he has better technology but is soon proved wrong as Computer Angel admits she also sent the virus, or more accurately manifested it, to teach Chow a lesson. Yuen fills the film with 90s cyberpunk motifs, even having Computer Angel, later identified as Lynn (Shu Qi), jump off a building in a shot that is a clear homage to Ghost in the Shell while otherwise employing electronic imagery of cables and wires though the “World Panorama” system largely works through satellite.
In the opening sequence, Chow’s company is also revealed to be a global enterprise connected around a large table via the internet while futuristic systems allow him to have video calls with associates speaking Japanese and English. He suggests they simply pay the hackers to save their reputation which is apparently built on their world-class security systems though he himself perhaps remains sceptical abruptly shutting down his younger brother’s attempt to broker a deal investing in a company called Dragon. His office meanwhile has a bonsai tree in the background and his brother Nunn seems to have very close ties with a Japanese gangster hinting at a possible economic anxiety.
This fraternal conflict is eventually reflected in the fracturing relationship between the two sisters as field agent Lynn informs her sister Sue (Zhao Wei) that she wants to give up the killing trade after reuniting with an old boyfriend and deciding to get married. Techno wiz Sue has no other means of supporting herself and is resentful that Lynn always takes charge and won’t let her participate in missions, though Lynn is later vindicated when Sue’s hasty decision to take on a solo job goes just about as wrong as it can go. Meanwhile, their relationship is also strained by the presence of Hung (Karen Mok), a policewoman investigating Chow’s death who, as she later says, is strangely drawn to Sue who rollerblades around her at a record store with thinly concealed desire.
There might be something in the fact that the actresses playing Sue and Lynn are from the Mainland and Taiwan respectively each performing their scenes in Mandarin but dubbed into Cantonese for the local release. They are indeed outsiders, firstly because of their unusual profession and secondly because of their all-powerful surveillance tool that allows them to carry out their missions yet also acting as a moral authority even if as Lynn later says they kill for money not conviction. World Panorama allows them to edit surveillance footage, placing fake avatars of themselves in the digital space and allowing them to otherwise recreate reality in a way that seems in keeping with the film’s otherwise low-key special effects which have an almost tongue-in-cheek quality parodying other more serious cyber thrillers from the mid-90s.
The film’s English title comes from Yuen’s use of the Carpenters’ track (They Long to Be) Close to You, yet the Chinese is the more melancholy Sunset Angel which is most obviously refers to the film’s final scene if also perhaps calling time on the sisters’ roles of guardians of next-gen tech and avenging ghosts of the machine working out the bugs of corrupt gangster businessmen. In any case, they move through the “real” world like digital avatars performing incredible feats of human agility and not least in the high impact action scenes culminating in a lengthy katana fight in a tatami mat room which both echoes the cyberpunk aesthetics and reinforces an idea of corporatising colonialism finally blown away by the forces of female solidarity and an unlikely loves story between a soldier and a bandit.
The last year of high school is a little premature to be defeated by life, but this seems to be what has happened to Etsuko. It’s fitting in a way, because her problem is that she simply gives up too early and is incapable of seeing anything through because she’s already convinced herself that there’s no point in trying. Yuhei Sakuragi’s anime adaptation of the book by Yoshiko Shikimura, Give It All (がんばっていきまっしょい, Ganbatte Ikimasshoi) is indeed all about how there’s no point giving up before the end and no matter the result there’s satisfaction to be gained just knowing that you gave it all you could.
But Etsuko can’t see that to begin with because she peaked too early. Back in primary school, she won all the races because she was tall for her age. But the other children eventually started catching up with her, and she started to fall behind. It didn’t really occur to her train or to try to compete with them because she was used to just winning and the realisation that she wasn’t “special” after all made her feel like a failure at life. To save herself similar pain, she started giving up before she even started believing that there wasn’t any point in trying. Even so, she’s sullen and miserable, not to mention resentful of those who do put in the effort and start to see results.
That’s one reason she’s reluctant to get involved with the rowing club again despite the encouragement of her best friend Hime. Badgered into it by transfer student Riina, she does the bare minimum and lets the others down, at one point just letting her oars drop while asking herself what it is she’s even doing here. But it’s also being part of a team that gives her a new sense of purpose as she realises that she’s the one who’s the weak link because she doesn’t have the stamina to keep up with the other girls.
Meanwhile, they all have their problems too. Riina is struggling to make new friends after moving to the town following her mother’s marriage and is also nervous around boys because she’s always attended single-sex schools. Taeko and Mayumi only joined the club to get back at each other because their families are supposedly feuding, though there’s a little bit more to their relationship drama than a buinsseness dispute between their parents. Hime is really just trying to keep the peace and get Etsuko back to being the confident and outgoing person she used be rather a sullen figure of defeat who is aloof to the point of rudeness and refuses to try at anything.
Ironically, it’s an encounter with the awkward team captain of a rival high school’s team that begins to open her eyes. Based on her earlier experiences, Etsuko assumes that the other team must just be innately talented and will win the upcoming race easily, but the other girl tells her that she’s mistaken. They didn’t win easily and they don’t have room for complacency. Though she seems jealous of the fun Etsuko and the others seem to be having and the genuine friendships that have arisen between them in contrast to the frosty determination and rigorous training that defines her relationship with her teammates, she reminds Etsuko that they work hard and that Etsuko’s team has potential if only they gave it their all.
While the 3D animation sometimes appears uncanny and distracts from the overall aesthetic, the beautifully designed backdrops add to the sense of peace and serenity in the town and echo Etsuko’s own unfolding sense of joy as the world around her brightens thanks to her new friends. What she learns is that it’s foolish to give up too soon without even trying, while not doing anything will leave her stuck in the middle of the water like a boat with no one rowing for the rest of her life. The thing about rowing is that it requires unity and the team to think as one, which means that she has to engage and bond with her teammates while finding fulfilment in her individual contribution through resolving to give it her all no matter what and knowing that’s worth it no matter the result.
Large organisations have a tendency to gloss over inconvenient truths, but is it really in keeping with the teachings of the Church to ignore a confirmed case of demonic possession and allow a boy to die rather than admit that demons are real and members of the clergy are conducting successful exorcisms? According to Sister Giunia (Song Hye-kyo), a chain-smoking nun with a penchant for vulgar language, it is not, but she is largely hamstrung because of the ingrained misogyny of the patriarchal superstructure of the Catholic religion.
A spin-off from 2015’s film The Priests, Dark Nuns (검은 수녀들, Geomeun Sunyeodeul) goes in hard for the Church’s hypocrisy. As Giuna squares off against a powerful demon when taking over from two priests who’ve botched an exorcism on a teenage boy, it taunts her that the blood of all the demons she has slain will echo in her womb like a drum. There’s a suggestion that the existence of a nun is itself is an affront to God, as if a woman who has rejected her maternity and remained celibate is an aberration suggesting that a woman’s only proper role lies in motherhood. The fact that Giuna is later diagnosed with uterine cancer implies the same, as if she has cursed herself in her decision to serve God and become a bride of Christ. In her final confrontation with the demon, it tells her again that she will die of the tumour in her womb, a fact she already knows, but Giunia counters that she will exorcise the demon from this boy and use her womb to imprison it. Which is to say, she will kill him with her maternity and thereby fulfil her ideal role by becoming a “mother” to this demon, and symbolically to Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) the possessed boy, before condemning them both to the flames.
This fact itself is ironic, as the council at the Church refused her request to conduct an exorcism because she is not ordained and “only” a nun. Of course, a woman cannot be ordained in the Catholic Church and the priesthood is open only to men. Her powerlessness within the organisation makes it easy for them to dismiss what she is saying while writing her off as a crazed devotee of the weird teachings of Father Kim, the priest from the earlier film. When they finally do give permission for an “unofficial exorcism” after Giuna has contacted the Rosicrucians in Rome to borrow some holy artefacts necessary for the ritual, the council inform her that the exorcism will be performed by Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook). A sceptic who believes demonic possession is a psychological phenomenon not a spiritual one, Father Paolo is an odd choice but there is something quite moving and transgressive when in he fact takes off his priestly robes and places them over Giunia’s shoulders, ordaining her and acknowledging both that what she has said is true and that she is the only person who can carry out this exorcism.
This is doubly true as Father Paolo had also tried to use the teachings of the Church to press another nun, Sister Michela (Jeon Yeo-been), by leading her to believe that her own spiritual awareness was a psychological illness that she should struggle to overcome through faith and medicine. It seems that Michela and other women like her may have found themselves retreating within Catholicism to reject the destiny of becoming a shaman while she herself was placed in a Catholic orphanage as a “cursed” child born between a human and a demon. Giuna had friend who was once a fellow nun but has now left to assume her true calling as a shamaness. The two remain good friends and often work together while Giuna is open to the presence of other gods and other forms of spiritual divination such as Michele’s talent with the Tarot. As such, all of these practices exist within a wider spiritual universe which is another challenge to the Church’s oppressive rigidity in its denial of folk beliefs and ancient traditions. After all, there is no real gender bias in shamanism, or if there is, it runs the other way for the majority of shamans are women.
In any case, beating the demon requires everyone to work together for a common goal using, as the Rosicrucian father says, “all available means”. Through participating in the exorcism, Sister Michela begins to accept her own identity later continuing to work with Deacon Choi to track down the remaining 12 Manifestations while accepting Sister Giuna as a mentor figure. They are each in a way freed from the Catholic Church while simultaneously remaining inside of it as they progress with their mission of quieting the demonic forces at large in the world and protecting the innocent from their rippling evil.
Dark Nuns is released digitally in the US July 15 courtesy of Well Go USA.
“Putting it into words makes it sound like a lie,” according to a young woman struggling to “be real” and express a truth without any of the awkwardness that interferes with emotional intimacy, but there are ways in which lies can be true and truth can be lies. Based on a novel by Keiichiro Hirano, author of A Man which also deals with similar themes, Yuya Ishii’s The Real You (本心, Honshin) probes at the nature of the human soul and asks if there really is such a thing as the “real” you or if authenticity is really possible in human interaction.
Both Ayaka (Ayaka Miyoshi) and the avatar of his mother Akiko (Yuko Tanaka) describe Sakuya (Sosuke Ikematsu) as being too pure for this world and to an extent they’re right even if many of his present problems are directly linked to having committed a “crime” in his youth. As the film opens in the summer of 2025, Sakuya is a factory worker watching helplessly as robots take over his work. After all, they don’t care about the heat, or being able to breathe under a heavy welding mask, nor do they get tired and they can get this job done much faster than he can. In any case, he ignores an ominous phone call from his mother, who appears to be showing signs of dementia, despite her telling him that she has something thing important to say and stays out with a friend after work only to spot her by the river in a storm on his way home. When she abruptly disappears, he assumes she entered the water and jumps in to save her but is injured himself and wakes up in hospital about a year later.
Of course, we don’t really know that he wakes up at all and it’s possible that all of this is really just a dream or an attempt to make contact with his authentic self through his relationships with two women, his mother and a young woman who also disappeared abruptly back in high school. Even though it’s only been a year, the AI revolution has marched on a pace and the entire world is now run by robots and avatars. Sakuya’s factory is no more, and the only job he can get is that of “Real Avatar” in which he rents out his physical body on behalf of clients who for whatever reason are unable to complete an action in person. Many of his early customers are elderly people who have opted for “elective death” and are trying to relive a precious memory vicariously through the VR headset before they go.
“Elective death” is one of the things that most bothers Sakuya in that he’s told it’s what his mother had chosen and that he’s getting a tax break and sizeable condolence payment so he can continue living in the family home. This eerie proposition that elderly people are being encouraged to decide that “this is enough” frightens Sakuya and hints at the eugenicist aims of an AI society in which those who are judged to be “weak” or cannot “contribute” in the way expected of them are forced to end their lives as if they didn’t deserve to live. He can’t understand why his mother would have chosen to die, but moreover, why she would have done it without even telling him. He can’t decide if the important thing she wanted to say was just about the elective death or if there was some greater truth he’ll now never know because he ignored her when she tried to tell him.
That’s one reason that he decides to use all his savings plus the condolence money to have an AI Avatar of his mother made in hope discovering what she wanted to say. Later he says that he wanted to know “Akiko Ishikawa,” rather just his mother, but is put off at first when confronted by the gap between the image of the mother he remembered and the objective reality. The creator, Nozaki, suggests incorporating memories from a young woman who was apparently his mother’s only real friend to get a fuller picture, but Sakuya resists insisting that he and his mother had no secrets from each other so she had no “hidden side”. Nozaki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) merely smirks and tells him that everyone has different sides to themselves that they don’t share with others, which Sakuya ought to know because there are things he’s not exactly hiding but doesn’t really want to talk about either.
His friend, Kishitani (Koshi Mizukami), wonders if there isn’t something a little incestuous about Sakuya’s desire to build a VF of his mother rather than his first love as he’d assumed he would, and he might be right in a way. Ayaka Miyoshi, played by the actress of the same name, shares a striking resemblance with the high school girl who exited the young Sakuya’s life, Yuki, and has a similar life story, though it’s not clear if they are actually the same person or not even if the AI version of his mother tells Sakuya that they are. Yet Ayaka is his only way of verifying that what the VF Akiko says is actually “true” rather than some random hallucination cooked up by the machine based on the incomplete information it’s been fed. Through the VF he finds out things about his mother’s past that shock him, not that he necessarily disapproves, just that they conflict so strongly with the image of his mother he’d always had. Additionally, there’s a degree of hurt that though he believed he and his mother shared everything, she kept this actually quite significant part of herself secret from him in much the same way he admits he didn’t tell Ayaka about his “crime” because he feared she might pull away from him if he did.
Ayaka also avoids talking about her past as a sex worker which has left her with PTSD and fear of being touched for much the same reason even if she suspects that Sakuya already knows and that his mother may have told him before she died. There’s an obvious parallel being drawn between them when Ayako insists that she made a clear choice to do sex work out of economic necessity and refuses to apologise for it, while Sakuya has also been selling his body as a Real Avatar. While some of his clients merely need help accomplishing things physically, others hire him for amusement. They send him on pointless errands running all over the city and then give him a bad review for smelling of sweat, or deliberately make him do degrading tasks. They also ask for things that are clearly illegal, such as another RA’s client requesting to see a man die. But Sakuya continues to wilfully degrade himself carrying out each of the tasks faithfully despite the pitying looks of those around him. When he’s unexpectedly employed by a wealthy avatar designer (Taiga Nakano) who uses a wheelchair, Sakuya again sheds his own identity and finds himself playing reverse Cyrano forced to make Ifi’s declaration of love on his behalf only to the consternation of Ayaka who isn’t sure who it’s coming from and is disappointed in both men for the obvious cruelty of the situation.
Thus this new technology becomes just another means of class-based oppression in which the wealthy use their riches to abuse those without economic means who have no choice but to submit themselves or rebel through criminality while the rich look on with amusement. Sakuya says he isn’t in love with Ayaka, but it’s unclear if he says it because he thinks she’s better off living in material comfort with Ifi, if he really means it, or he’s realised that he was more in love with the image of the girl who disappeared and the missing side of his mother than he really was with her. It seems that Sakuya is really looking for the hidden half of himself through refracted images of the way others see him, while essentially engaging in an internalised dialogue with his own thoughts and memories. He can’t really be sure of the truth behind anything the VF says, a fact brought home by the implication that the great truth he was seeking is a banal platitude and what he undoubtedly wanted to hear yet knew all along. Nevertheless, it’s not until hearing it that he can regain his real self, let go of the past, and be in a position to connect with Ayaka which is also a kind of waking up. Disquieting in its implications for a new AI-based society in which the line between the real and virtual has all but disappeared, there is nevertheless something quite poignant in Sakuya’s gradual path towards saying goodbye but also hello to a new life of greater self-awareness and independence.
The Real You screens in New York July 11 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.
An oft-repeated criticism of the work of Yasujiro Ozu is that it is all the same. The similarity of the English-language titles with their ubiquitous seasonality doesn’t help, but you have to admit there is some truth in it. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Ozu was not so interested in uniformity or repetition as he was in dialogue with himself. Thus Late Spring becomes Late Autumn and the abandoned father a conflicted mother, the two boys of I Was Born But… who rejected their father’s descent into corporate lackydom become arch consumerists seceding from society until their parents give them a TV set in Good Morning. Ozu refrained from remarking on the repurposing of old plots for new dramas, but did expressly regard his 1959 Floating Weeds as a “remake” of the 1934 A Story of Floating Weeds updated to the present day and filmed in the, by then, classic Ozu style.
As in the 1934 version, the action centres on the arrival of a theatrical troupe to a small town which they have not visited in some years, in this case 12. This time around, the troupe is a little more exulted, performing kabuki-style narrative theatre rather than rustic entertainment, but is subject to many of the same problems. Kihachi is now Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura), a much older man though cheerful and energetic. He has chosen this town because it is home to an old flame, Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), who is the mother of his adolescent son, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi). Kiyoshi thinks that Komajuro is his mother’s brother and that his father is long dead. He recognises Komajuro right away and is pleased to see him, though they evidently have not met in many years.
The 1934 version had revolved around Kihachi’s corrupted paternity in his shame regarding the stigma of being a travelling player. By 1959 that is simply no longer so much of an issue, but whereas the financial difficulties Kihachi’s troupe faced were partly a symptom of the depression and partly of their misfortunes, those of Komajuro take on a more melancholy quality because it is obvious that this is a way of life which is coming to an end. When Kihachi says he’s going to start over, it seems futile but he is still young enough to have a credible chance. Komajuro is already “old” and it’s clear that he will struggle to support himself as a travelling actor simply because it is no longer a viable occupation.
Thus Komajuro’s story is less one of frustrated fatherhood than of melancholy resignation to the vagaries of a lifetime. “Life is an unknown course”, he tells Oyoshi, “the only constant is change”. Like Kihachi he doesn’t want his son to see the show, though perhaps more out of embarrassment. Kiyoshi complains that the character in his play is “unrealistic” because he doesn’t relate to the modern world. Komajuro objects but explains that he is “a character from another era”, making it plain that he is talking as much about himself. Komajuro is a man left behind by time and incapable of understanding the world in which he now lives which may be one reason he seems to hang on to an intense desire to save Kiyoshi from being affected by the stigma of being the son of a travelling actor even though that is no longer something he would need saving from.
This slight disconnect, along with Gajiro Nakamura’s cheekily comical performance, adds to the genial comedy which characterised the majority of Ozu’s colour films though this one is admittedly slightly less colourful owing to being produced by Daiei as one of a handful of films made outside Ozu’s home studio of Shochiku. Komajuro becomes a tragicomic rather than purely tragic figure, a man suddenly realising he has become old and facing the decline of his patriarchal authority. Like Kihachi he turns violence on both his mistress, Sumiko (Machiko Kyo), and the young actress Kayo (Ayako Wakao) who has fallen for his son, but it’s futile and born of desperation. A more sympathetic figure than 1934’s Otaka, Sumiko seems to genuinely like Komajuro and is hurt as well as jealous and threatened by the existence of his “secret” family. Her petty revenge is taken in response to Komajuro’s bitter claim that his son “belongs to a higher race” moments after bringing up her past as a sex worker. Rather than a simple desire for chaos and upset, she intends to pull Kiyoshi down to her level through getting him to sleep with Kayo, but Kayo falls for him for real only to worry she is perhaps ruining his bright future.
“One can’t suddenly show up out of nowhere and assert one’s parental authority,” Komajuro eventually realises. His hopes are dashed by Kiyoshi’s relationship with Kayo not because of her proximity to the world of the travelling actor, but because he fears it means that Kiyoshi is just like him, an irresponsible womaniser. He wanted to save Kiyoshi as a means of saving himself, pushing his son into a more respectable world he had been unable to enter. Kiyoshi, however, rejects his sacrifice, describing his parents as “selfish” for keeping the secret all this time only to drop a bombshell now. He complains he’s been fine these 20 years and does not want or need a father beyond the one he already thought to be dead. Rather than the nobility Komajuro’s of paternal sacrifice, the focus is pulled back towards the son and his filial responsibility to live up to it by becoming a fine and upstanding young man while Komajuro is once again exiled back to the moribund world of the travelling actor.
Of course, the world of 1959 was very different to that of 1934. The economy was at last improving and consumerist pleasures were very much on the horizon, meaning that for many life was comfortable at last. Japan was at peace if not completely free of political strife which removes the constant anxiety felt by those trying to survive the mid-1930s. But Ozu himself was also 25 years older and had perhaps reached that sense of resignation with the world that allowed him to sigh and laugh where before he may have trembled with fear or rage. Komajuro is as he always was, a floating weed, a man without a home, but now perhaps one of many rootless wanderers off the post-war landscape.
Japanese cinema is filled with tales of maternal self-sacrifice which is more often than not rejected by ungrateful children unable to understand the depths of a mother’s love. More contrarian than most would have it, Yasujiro Ozu’s abiding interest is with fathers and particularly with those who are flawed but loving. 1934’s A Story of Floating Weeds (浮草物語, Ukigusa Monogatari) which he later remade in colour 25 years later, is a tale of one such father and another of his “Kihachi” movies, but situates itself in a liminal space defined by Kihachi’s precarious position as a member of a virtual underclass of travelling players.
Kichachi’s (Takeshi Sakamoto) troupe is returning to a small town after four years where they hope to stay a year. Unbeknownst to the other members, Kihachi has an ulterior motive in that the town is home to his former lover Otsune (Choko Iida) and his illegitimate son, Shinkichi (Koji Mitsui) who thinks that Kichachi is just a family friend and that his father was a civil servant who has now passed away. As is usual in travelling player stories, the troupe is in crisis and on the verge of disbanding, so Kihachi’s frequent absences do not go unnoticed, particularly by his current mistress Otaka (Rieko Yagumo) who has a petty and vindictive streak. When one of the veteran actors spills the beans, she marches straight over to Otsune’s to make trouble but Kihachi, sick of her possessive behaviour, breaks up with her. To take revenge, she bribes another actress, Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi), to seduce Shinkichi.
The central issue is one of Kihachi’s frustrated paternity. It’s clear that he couldn’t be physically present for his family but has always done his best to support them financially while Otsune runs a small restaurant. They are not married and their present relationship seems to be more one of companionship than romance but whatever label they might put on it they get along well and both deeply care for their son. While in town, Kihachi busies himself with fatherly activities, playing board games with Shinkichi or fishing in the local stream. It pains him that his visit may be short and that Shinkichi, who seems to like him a great deal, has no idea he is his son.
That is largely because Kihachi’s only hope in life is that he spare Shinkichi from the depressing life of a travelling player. He has been paying for his education and Shinkichi is now almost a man, apparently a post-graduate student at an agricultural school. When he expresses an interest in coming to see the show, Kihachi seems panicked and tells him the kinds of shows he does are not for people like him and that he should stay home and study. Shinkichi laughs at the fatherly advice but little knows that it comes from a place of shame. Travelling players are regarded as an underclass. They are often barred from inns and not considered polite company.
“My son belongs to a world better than yours,” he shouts to Otaka during a heated, rain-drenched argument during which she threatens to expose him. Otoki, the other actress, was originally reluctant to enact Otaka’s plan, but later found herself falling for Shinkichi. Perhaps a young man bedding a travelling actress isn’t a grand shame or much of a problem for him, at least not so much as to provoke Kichahi’s despair in exclaiming he has caused his son’s ruin, but destroys his father’s hopes of keeping him out of that untouchable world for which he had sacrificed so much including his paternal love.
Yet like the ungrateful child of a hahamono, on learning the truth Shinkichi rejects his sacrifice and feels only his abandonment, refusing to believe that any father could be so “selfish”. The rejection comes at a low point, immediately after Kihachi loses the acting troupe and considers returning to Otsune for a settled, ordinary life as a husband and father. Otsune scolds her son, reminding him that all he wanted was to give Shinkichi the settled, ordinary life that he could never live as a travelling player. It seems this life will always elude him, he is barred from his own home and must forever wander. Being a good father means he must keep far away from his son, a floating weed with no place to call home.
A quartet of Thai directors come together for four tales of horror in the appropriately titled 4bia (สี่แพร่ง). Though the stories are largely unconnected save for a few common details that locate them in the same universe, they each deal with a particular kind of anxiety and different sorts of ghosts who for various reasons are haunting the protagonists. What’s certain is that if you’re targeted by an otherworldly spirit, finding escape will not be easy.
That’s something quite obvious even in the first episode in which a young woman trapped alone in her apartment after breaking her leg in a horrific car crash begins chatting with a total stranger who sends her a random text message. Of course, replying to a message like that is not very sensible and even perhaps dangerous, as Pin (Maneerat Kham-uan) herself may release when she asks the (presumably) male messenger to send a photo only to be sent back the one she just sent of herself with the reply that he’s in it next to her. In any case, the real malevolent force here seems to be loneliness itself which is what motivates Pim to message back having already spent 100 days without interacting with another human being. The messenger has also spent the same amount of time alone in what he calls a “cramped space,” which is why he wants company. It’s gradually revealed that the pair share a kind of destiny which is an inversion of the kinds of meet-cutes you might find in a romantic comedy that makes Pim’s 100 days a purgatorial space of borrowed time in which she might as well have been a ghost herself.
But in the second chapter, Tit for Tat, it’s almost the opposite of loneliness that’s the problem as bunch of delinquent high school students and recreational drug users bully a bookish boy, Ngid (Nattapol Pohphay) and end up killing him. The boy then becomes a vengeful spirit and uses black magic to take them all out. Though one of them quips that they need to start smoking less weed, there’s no real question that the ghost is real or that the gang pretty much deserve what’s coming to them for having been so obnoxious in real life. The later part of the drama focuses on Pink (Apinya Sakuljaroensuk), a peripheral member of the gang who did try to tell the others to stop but otherwise did nothing to help Ngid and is punished for her sin of omission, though she does eventually think of a way to break the curse if only ironically in poetic justice for simply standing by and watching in the face of injustice.
The third sequence, Banjong Pisanthanakun’s Man in the Middle is, however, a meta textual-delight that asks why ghosts in films always have long hair and pale faces. Four boys go on a rafting trip and swap campfire stories about how you should never sleep on the end when you’re close to the jungle in case a succubus comes to get you. When they get into an accident on the water and are separated, it leads to a sense of suspicion as some wonder if their friend actually died and is a ghost come to haunt them who, like in the Sixth Sense, may not know he’s dead. Though the twist maybe somewhat predictable, the tale is told with good humour and a sense of narrative cohesiveness that is lacking in some of the other chapters.
Similarly, the final instalment Last Fright, is a chamber piece focusing on a stewardess who is unexpectedly charged with escorting a princess (Nada Lesongan) who’s fallen out of favour on her trip to Thailand where she spent her honeymoon. Pim’s (Laila Boonyasak) secret is that she’s been having an affair with the princess’ husband whom she met on their honeymoon flight which is why the incredibly imperious woman tortures her all the way through the flight before dying in a hotel room on arrival. Pim must, for reasons that don’t really make sense, escort the body back only to begin going out of her mind while haunted by the princess’ spirit. This is the only sequence which flirts with the idea of the ghost not actually being real but a manifestation of Pim’s guilt, or else a vengeful spirit come to punish her not for her secondary crime but for the transgression of adultery. Despite its potentially moralising overtones it’s a pretty chilling moment on which to end the film suggesting that in the end there is no real escape either from a vengeful ghost or your own questionable decisions.
Japanese cinema has not always been willing to contend with contentious social issues such as immigration. More recently, however, indie filmmakers in particular have been keen to critique the nation’s attitudes towards those who’ve come to make their home there. Like Akio Fujimoto’s Along the Sea, Lim Kah Wai’s Come and Go (カム・アンド・ゴー) explores the lives of those who’ve come to Japan, in this case Osaka, in search of a better life but have mostly encountered exploitation and prejudice while marginalised Japanese residents apparently fare little better.
Lim weaves his disparate tale around the discovery of a skeleton in a rundown part of town which is later found to belong to an elderly woman apparently reported missing six months previously. The comings and goings that we witness are an interconnected series of movements between a quartet of South Korean sex workers apparently trying their luck in Osaka because of an economic downturn at home, a tour group of wealthy Chinese tourists mainly interested in shopping, their guide, a Malaysian businessman in town for a presentation about tourism, a lost Japanese woman failing to make it as a hostess, an Okinawan porn producer literally pulling women off the street and embarrassing them into taking part in his videos, a Taiwanese sex tourist, a Vietnamese man on a “Technical Trainee” scheme but trapped in exploitative factory work, a student from Burma sexually harassed at the second of her part-time jobs, a Nepali refugee dreaming of opening a restaurant of his own, the Japanese teacher he is having an affair with, her husband the policeman, a middle-aged Japanese man embarking on a career as a rent-an-uncle, and a man being exploited while working in a car park who also seems to be mixed up with gangsters.
Osaka it seems is a busy place. Mr Lee, the man travelling with the Korean sex workers, harps on about the “Osaka dream” as if the city held some special allure but pretty much everyone is struggling, either exploiting or exploited by others. Like the three women of Along the Sea, Nam came to Osaka on the technical trainee programme but is treated badly by his unsympathetic boss who refuses to give him permission to return to Vietnam temporarily to visit his mother who has been taken ill. Nam too attempts to run away, contacting a Vietnamese friend who runs a restaurant for advice where he’s told to convert his technical trainee visa to a student one by enrolling in a language school so he can “come and go” as he pleases. This is the same language school where Yoshiko, the policeman’s wife currently having an affair with Nepali Refugee Musoun, works. We can see that her classes are barely attended, and when she asks her boss about apparently fake names on the roster, she’s told to make her attendance figures look better on paper. It’s clear that not everything is on the level at the school, the headmaster explaining to Nam he needs to pay a hefty fee to enrol but that’s OK because they can help him find a part-time job in return for a hefty part of his salary. Later picked up by the police, Nam runs into another Vietnamese guy who also left his technical trainee programme but now regrets it, claiming he was cheated by false promises and one of his friends even took his own life as a result.
Working at the same factory but as a part-timer, Burmese student Mimi finds something similar as she’s sexually harassed by the skeevy middle-aged boss at her second part-time job at a supermarket. While the men are forced to deal with labour exploitation and physical violence, the women are also subject to ingrained patriarchal values as evidenced by the preoccupation with sex and pornography among many of the male visitors such as sex tourist Xiao Kang who idly plays with sex toys in a store while lining up for an autograph from an AV actress, or the collection of sleazy Chinese businessmen demanding to be set up with authentic Japanese porn stars. The problem there is that porn producer Ryuji is deep in debt to yakuza loan sharks and has no women on his books, eventually brokering an unconvincing deal with Chinese tour guide Cheung and the South Korean pimp Lee to pass off the Korean sex workers as Japanese porn stars assuming that the Chinese won’t notice the difference because one woman’s as good as another. Meanwhile, conservative Malaysian family man William finds himself extremely uncomfortable when forced to conduct business in a hostess bar which his contact keeps insisting is how business gets done in Japan while unwilling to change his behaviour to accommodate his guest which is in itself ironic as William is there to advise them on boosting tourism from Malaysia through cultural awareness.
While well-meaning protestors take to the streets to hold an anti-discrimination rally, Kenji fairly points out that they preach acceptance for the international community but ignore mixed-ethnicity citizens like himself, something fully borne out by their rather defensive and somewhat prejudiced conversation when he leaves to use the bathroom. The police conference regarding the skeleton ends with the policeman lamenting that the modern society has become selfish and indifferent to the feelings of others placing wealth and convenience above community which is how an old woman’s body went undiscovered so long and apparently became mixed up in a complicated real estate scam. Even the Japanese rent-an-uncle is forging time-limited, compensated relationships with strangers while his own son ironically tries to convince him to retire to Malaysia so he can get his hands on the house. These people are all connected even if they don’t know it, all victims of the same oppressive system as the city moves all around them increasingly indifferent to their existence.
Familial absence and painful nostalgia once again take centre stage in Naomi Kawase’s third feature, Shara (沙羅双樹, Sharasoju), in which she also stars as an expectant mother still contending with tremendous loss. Set once again in the director’s hometown of Nara, Shara continues Kawase’s key themes in its gradual healing of a fractured family which finds itself at a point of departure, struggling to accept the path forward but finding strength in friendship and community spirit as they prepare to welcome a new life both figurative and literal.
Shooting in her usual documentary style, Kawase opens with an ethereal handheld sequence wandering through an antiquated atelier until finding twin brothers playing with charcoal ink in a pure white room. Suddenly one of the boys, Shun, runs off and is chased by his brother, Kei, as the chanting of monks and the sound of bells accompany them marking this as a festival day. At some point, the boys switch places. Shun pauses to bounce off a car and realises his brother has turned a corner and can no longer be seen. He looks for him in vain before returning to his mother, making preparations at the temple, and explains what’s happened but Kei is not found nor ever seen again.
An unannounced time jump moves us on some years into the future in which Shun (Kohei Fukungaga) is now a moody teenager obsessively painting a portrait of his absent brother, while his mother, Reiko (Naomi Kawase), is heavily pregnant and father, Taku (Katsuhisa Namase), is once again preparing for the festival. The family is, of course, defined by its absence, the unanswered question of Kei one they each actively avoid trying to address even as the impending birth of the new baby forces them into a reconsideration of their familial bonds. While Reiko tends to her flowers, which is to say to life, Taku busies himself to the street festival while only Shun remains definitively locked within his grief, isolating himself to finish the painting while tempted away from broody introspection by his pretty neighbour, Yu (Yuka Hyodo), who we learn is also contending with displacement and identity in learning that her mother is actually her aunt who had slightly problematic feelings for her older brother who like Kei simply disappeared one day and never returned.
As often in Kawase’s filmmaking, the literal truths may be less important than the emotional or the spiritual. Kei’s body is eventually found, an event greeted with stoic resignation by the parents who must perhaps have been expecting it, while only Shun is thrown into chaotic despair in once again being confronted not only by his loss but the guilt and the finality. Both Reiko and Taku declare that it’s time to “face” things, something they have perhaps been refusing to do even while Shun was literally facing his brother in painting his portrait. Taku explains to his son that there are things which can be forgotten, others which must not, and more that must be. Painting a calligraphy banner with the characters for shadow and light, he tries to show his son a new way forward.
Yet it’s the local festival with its traditional Basara dance which finally allows Shun to find the path out of his grief. Kawase captures the local planning meeting with documentary rigour, Taku listening patiently while a local man explains the point of their festival is to make sure that the whole community is involved, something later made plain when Shun, hitherto a marshal, is invited to join the dance which continues even as the rain falls. Taku’s final speech in which he describes Basara dance as “a unique event in which each of us can shine our brightest” takes on new significance as the sun finally comes out. “When you’re offered the opportunity to shine you must grab it”, he concludes, hoping that the spirit of Basara dance will make its way into the rest of their lives.
Elliptically structured and shot with Kawase’s trademark handheld, the film finds its way back to where it started as the chiming of the temple bell recurs with its air of anxious alarm, but is finally quieted, giving way to the peaceful summer sounds of the cooling breeze and ubiquitous cicadas as the family is perhaps repaired with the advent of new life, not replacing the old, but beginning again even in the midst of such unanswerable grief.
Windows on Worlds 