Category: Nippon Connection 2024

18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (青春18×2 君へと続く道, Michihito Fujii, 2024)

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Apparently inspired by a real life viral blog, the latest from the prolific Michihito Fujii, 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (青春18×2 君へと続く道, Seishun 18×2 Kimi e to Tsudzuku Michi) is in many ways in dialogue with Shunji Iwai’s Lover Letter which itself makes an appearance in the film in a allusion to a love that as the hero says never quite even began. Even so, the he, as the heroine had, undertakes a journey not so much to find himself as to recover the young man he once was before romantic heartbreak and professional strife left him emotionally numb and filled with despair.

Jimmy (Greg Hsu Kuang-han) says he’s on a journey with no destination, and perhaps, he is though it’s clear there is an end point in sight only one he’s reluctant to go to. It’s never quite clear to what extent the film intends its big reveal to be quite so obvious, though it seems clear enough that this is a tale of lost love and a circular journey towards a new beginning. After being kicked off the board at the games company he started, Jimmy catches sight of an old postcard soaked in the perfume of a girl he once new perhaps ironically called the flow of time. It does indeed call him back to the past, sending him on a trip to Japan where he too encounters various people who help him to reaffirm himself during a solo trip towards the nexus of his emotional pain.

Back in Tainan 18 years previously, he developed a crush on a young Japanese woman, Ami (Kaya Kiyohara), who rocked up at the karaoke bar he was working at the summer before uni and asked for a job having lost her wallet. Ami is four years older than him and perhaps sees his clumsy attempts at courtship as childish even as he earnestly brushes up his Japanese to be able to converse with her but otherwise treats him warmly if keeping him at arms length. In his own recollections, Jimmy was a clueless teenager who never really picked up on the pregnant hints Ami was leaving him in her sometimes cryptic comments and confusing behaviour but nevertheless went into a massive sulk on hearing she planned to return to Japan wasting precious time with her and almost ruining the memories of their tentative relationship by allowing it to end on a sour note.

The 36-year-old Jimmy is only a little wiser, a lonely, melancholy man who appeared to have little aside from the work that been taken away from him. This apparent mid-point of his life, a double 18 split in the middle, affords him the opportunity for self-reflection as many of those he meets along his way remind him. What he’s doing in a way is travelling on the flow of time, heading back into the past in order to travel through it and out the other side as he later says leaving this moment of youth behind to move into a more settled adulthood and an end to his frustrated inertia. 

As in Love Letter, he ends up deep in frosty snow country reflecting the emotional coolness of his adult self in contrast with the tropical temperatures of Tainan and sunniness of his memories of the summer with Ami. What he discovers is also a kind of love letter as yet undelivered but waiting for him at the destination he was afraid to approach as a kind of closure that will allow him to begin moving forward while carrying his memories with him rather than remaining trapped inside them. Reflecting that the people we meet along the way each leave something of themselves behind in our hearts, Jimmy is finally able to recognise himself and discover a way forward in reaccepting the memories of his summer that never quite blossomed into love as warm and comforting rather than the chilly sadness of the pure white vistas of snow country on Ami’s postcard. Travel doesn’t as much broaden his horizons as remove them, leaving him with an endless, meandering journey open to the possibilities of life and a spirit of adventure born of a lost but not forgotten love.

18×2 Beyond Youthful Days screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Trailer (English subtitles)

Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE- (翔んで埼玉 ～琵琶湖より愛をこめて～, Hideki Takeuchi, 2023)

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The Saitamafication of Japan continues in the long-awaited sequel to the hit 2019 comedy Fly Me to the Saitama. Though the visa system has been abolished and the citizens of Saitama are new free to enter the capital, that does not mean to say everyone is on the same page and the prefecture still faces internal divisions and increasing factionalism. Revolutionary Rei (Gackt) proposes a solution which involves connecting the series of train lines to make it easier to get around and building a beach resort to lesson their sense of inferiority over having no access to the sea.

Once again it has to be said that humour is very local and largely built around regional stereotypes, though it is perhaps curious that the ordinary citizens are often seen in clothing reminiscent of the 1930s something which is also echoed in scenes of trains arriving at stations greeted by crowds of well-wishers seeing soldiers off to war. This may in a sense echo the film’s central theme in the encroachment of Osaka imperialism in which Japan’s second city has launched a not so secret campaign to Osakify the rest of the nation, if not the world, using white powder manifesting as sand from Koshien Baseball Stadium which is a holy place to many as it is where the high school baseball championship takes place. 

They have a visa system in Osaka too, or more strictly the Kansai area, with Kyoto and Kobe apparently in on the plot and intent on looking down on suburban areas such as Wakayama and Shiga which is where Rei was planning on getting his sand. Shiga is set up as a the Saitama of the south west, a pleasant if dull sort of place with a lake its only claim to fame. Like Saitama it has a liberation front, led by Kikyo (Anne Watanabe) who known as the Oscar of Shiga because she went to France to study revolutions and is is dressed like Oscar from the Rose of Versailles. 

The citizens of Kyoto come in for a bit of a kicking for their stereotypically snobbish attitude, the natural politeness of the local dialect undone by a social gadget that reveals what they’re “really” thinking which is that their definition of Kyoite is very narrow. The stereotypical view of Osaka, as voiced towards the end of the film, is that the people are cheerful and warmhearted. The city is associated with comedy and particularly manzai double acts like the one which appears during the opening credits, which perhaps adds to the sense of despair and confusion that the normally nice Osakans could suddenly be hellbent on world domination aided by the already strong love for takoyaki throughout the nation.

As before, we also have a “real world” subplot in which members of a family listen to the radio broadcast outing the urban legend of Rei and his BL love story with Momomi, the Tokyo-raised governor of Saitama. These regional rivalries are tearing up the real world too with a tug of war match that threats to go incredibly wrong if the two areas with an existing beef are allowed to face each other in the final. In contrast, the fantasy world is a riot of zany 18th-century influenced design that sees Rei set off on a pirate ship to get his sand for the fake beach though the mayor of Kobe turns up dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Kyoto-ite has Taisho-esque straw hat. When the gang are caught by the fascisitic Osakans they’re relegated to a dungeon under Koshien Stadium and enslaved because of Saitama’s low ranking amid the other prefectures of Japan.

It’s all very silly, and somewhat impenetrable to non-Japanese speakers who can’t pick up on the dialect switching or zany wordplay while a certain degree of familiarity with regional stereotypes is certainly helpful. In any case, while the Osakafication of Japan undoubtedly sounded quite bad, the same cannot be said for its Saitamaification and Rei’s desire to create a land without discrimination free of the oppression and inequality born of pointless regional snobbery where everyone is free to go wherever they please without let or hinderance. 

Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE- screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Hijacked Youth – Dare to Stop Us 2 (青春ジャック 止められるか、俺たちを2,  Junichi Inoue, 2024)

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A loose sequel to 2018’s Dare to Stop Us, Hijacked Youth (青春ジャック 止められるか、俺たちを2, Seishun Hijack Tomerareruka, Oretachi wo 2) picks up a decade later with an autobiographically inspired tale from writer director Junichi Inouchi but in its way also becomes the latest in a series of indie films to offer a celebration of Japan’s mini theatres still struggling with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic while exploring the origins of the contemporary independent film scene. 

The allusion seems clear even from the film’s opening in which cinephile and former programmer Kimita (Masahiro Higashide) fears for the future of cinema amid the arrival of the VCR. Having quit his job to support a young family, he is puzzled but eventually won over when unexpectedly contacted by notorious film director Koji Wakamastu (Arata Iura) who has apparently decided to open a cinema in provinciail Nagoya after the screening of Ecstasy of the Angels was restricted because someone bombed a police box for real. Kimita wants to run it as a rep cinema, but Wakamatsu sees it partly as a vanity project and a side business so has his eye on the bottom line. Making the mistake of programming films he thinks are good rather than ones people want to see quickly puts them in the red with Wakamatsu pressuring Kimita to give in and agree to screen pink films even though he himself had admitted that pink cinema had had its day. 

Wakamatsu is forever taking Kimita to task for having a prejudice against these kinds of films which are after all the kind that Wakamatsu makes though he does concede that there are talented directors working in pink film who may someday become the leading lights of the Japanese cinema industry. Some of that is hindsight, but what the film is working towards is a link between pink film, which was independently produced in contrast to something like Roman Porno which was made by a studio with much higher budgets and production values, and the rise of independent cinema which is largely dependent on the mini cinema ecosystem to it keep going. 

But then the film is also a nostalgic memoir revolving around the director’s teenage dreams and his eventual meeting of Wakamatsu thanks to the cinema in Nagoya. The irony is that the first film had been titled “Dare to Stop Us,” focussing on Wakamatsu Pro during the turbulent days before Asama-sanso as an anarchic force in a sometimes staid film industry. But the through line here is that everyone gives up far too easily. Kimita abandoned his dreams to sell video recorders, while the young woman who works for him believes she has three strikes against her, the first being her gender, the second a lack of talent, and the third which she does not disclose that she’s a member of the Zainichi community of ethnic Koreans often discriminated against even the Japan of the 1980s and in fact today. 

Junichi gives up a bit easily too after making a twit of himself on Wakamatsu’s film set, though the picture he paints of him is larger than life. Fatherly and compassionate, he gives him solid advice to go to a proper uni and learn filmmaking with him while otherwise taking him under his wing, but also pretty much takes over after giving him his first opportunity to make a film and has a tendency to take no prisoners when it comes to his crew members. At least as far as the film would have it, he’s become a rather lonely figure now that his more politically minded friends have scattered following he decline of the student movement in Japan. As much as anything else, the film is a sort of hagiography as evidenced by the surreal coda which seems to reference the director’s early death in traffic accident in 2012, jumping forward 30 years to find the cinema still open and celebrating his legacy more literally yet also in its existence in supporting the indie scene Wakamatsu helped to birth. According to Wakamatsu, the most important thing is finding your own angle and sticking to it, something his rebellious spirit at least may have fostered in the many directors who started their careers at Wakamatsu Pro and not least Inoue himself.

Hijacked Youth – Dare to Stop Us 2  screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Let’s Go Karaoke! (カラオケ行こ！, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2023)

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Singing is serious business. In Nobuhiro Yamashita’s adaptation of the manga by Yama Wayama Let’s Go Karaoke! (カラオケ行こ！Karaoke Ikou!), it’s matter of life and death, metaphorically at least, for a young man confronting adolescence and a zany gangster who seems kind of lonely but is desperate to learn how not to embarrass himself at the boss’ big sing off so he won’t be subjected to a homemade tattoo of his most hated motif.

`The irony is perhaps that this kind of yakuza at least doesn’t really exist anymore and “Crazy Kid” Kyoji (Go Ayano) is in many ways a ghost of a bygone era inhabiting a Showa-era shopping arcade soon to be torn down and replaced by a luxury hotel. Meanwhile, high schooler Satomi (Jun Saito) is also facing a kind of apocalypse in that he’s a boy a soprano whose voice has begun to change. His encroaching puberty leads him to blame himself when the school choir only places during the nationals not making it to finals. But it’s at this concert that Kyoji first hears his “angelic” voice and decides he’s the perfect person to teach him how sing, intimidating him into an impromptu karaoke session.

As Satomi later points out, adults don’t invite kids to karaoke and this arrangement would be odd even if Kyoji were not an old school yakuza with a severed finger in his glove compartment. Of course, Satomi’s frightened but cannot really say no offering a few words of advice by daring to tell Kyoji that his falsetto is  “sickening” and he should stop waving his hands around if he wants to master the art of singing. It is also doesn’t help that his choice of song, Kurenai by X Japan, a hair rock epic mostly written in broken English, is a song of manly melodrama which requires a good deal of screaming. Despite having enlisted Satomi, Kyoji talks about one of his fellow footsoldiers as if he’s died when he’s only decided to get some professional singing lessons in an effort not to come last and end up with a lame tattoo.

Yamashita frames both their challenges as the same, Satomi fearing a social death and the death of his youth if he takes to the stage at what he’s sure would be his final concert and his voice cracks while Kyoji, ironically enough, does not really fear a literal death but the pain and humiliation of being branded by the boss for being bad at karaoke. Despite their differences a genuine a sense of friendship does arise between them, if also a possibly inappropriate homoerotic tension, as they support each other towards their shared goals and learn to sing from the heart which was apparently the real problem with Satomi’s school choir seemingly more obsessed with technique and correctness than the simple joy of singing. 

Hovering on a precipice, Satomi exists in a liminal space in his own way as ghostly as Kyoji surrounded by the obsolete. In his school film club, of which he is an honorary member, they watch VHS tapes of classics such as White Heat, Casablanca, and Bicycle Thieves which can only be watched once because the player’s broken and you can’t rewind anymore. His world’s on the brink of eclipse, and his friendship with Kyoji is a harbinger of a darker, more adult world but also one that’s less frightening than it ought to be with its admittedly scary gangsters obsessed with karaoke and bad tattoos. He starts to wonder if Kyoji was even real or some kind of imaginary friend appearing to help him deal with his impending adolescence and what it means for his singing career, but is finally reassured by a piece of concrete evidence confirming at least that it did really happen if leaving him with a sense of loneliness once their quests have come to an end. Surreal in its cheerful darkness, Yamashita’s heartfelt drama is an advocation for the for the healing powers of karaoke and the importance of singing from from the heart no matter how it might sound to those you who may themselves shed a few manly tears over a song about lost love and absent friends.

Let’s Go Karaoke! screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Secret: A Hidden Score (言えない秘密, Hayato Kawai, 2024)

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The shojo manga vibes are so strong with Hayato Kawai’s Secret: A Hidden Score (言えない秘密, Ienai Himitsu) that it’s difficult to believe it’s actually a remake of a Taiwanese film from 2007. Anyone remotely familiar with the genre will have figured the mystery fairly early on though Kawai does his best to build on the gothic overtones in what is actually a story about the hero’s recovery of his love for music having had it beaten out of him while studying abroad in the UK. 

To that extent, Minato’s (Taiga Kyomoto) disillusionment with the piano is akin to a loss of the self. He’s come back from London earlier than expected and is quickly humiliated during his friends’ hazing ritual of making him participate in a piano duel with another student which he gives up on half way through. Having experienced a truly terrible teacher who shouted and bullied him into feeling as if he should give up on music if not life Minato is left listless and lonely with no sense of direction.

This might be why he’s drawn to Yukino (Kotone Furukawa), a mysterious presence he first encounters after being struck by the sound of her playing piano in an abandoned music room soon to be torn down. He asks her what the name of the song is, but she only tells him that it’s a secret like many other things about her. Minato is fascinated but also resentful, captivated by the mystery that surrounds Yukino while frustrated by the playful distance she keeps from him. In many ways she represents life, not only romantic love but restoring his love of music and a sense of confidence in it born of his rediscovery of the simple joy of playing as symbolised by the toy piano which his father (Toshinori Omi) is also trying to repair for him.

Yet it’s also clear something’s not quite right. Yukino’s clothes are slightly old-fashioned and she doesn’t own any kind of mobile phone. No one else on campus seems to know her and she often disappears without warning only to reappear just as unexpectedly. A minor love triangle develops between Minato, Yukino, and his childhood friend Hikari (Mayu Yokota) which later provokes a secondary emotional crisis though it’s clear this slippery duet that Minato is playing gradually allows him to open himself back up emotionally so that he can re-embrace his love of music and once again play the piano which is all he’d lived for until the cruel worlds of sadistic teacher caused him to want to give up on life.

Kawai certainly ups the romance with the gothic aesthetics of the disused music room along with the drafty corridors leading to it, though when the secret is eventually revealed it’s something of an anti-climax given its obviousness and the lack of effect it has on Minato who seems to be left with another unfinished symphony of longing and loneliness destined to echo through his music for years to come. There is however a poignancy in Yukino’s declaration that she just wanted to be an ordinary girl and in the shattering of her romantic illusions when she sees that Hikaru is in love with Minato and subject to none of the barriers that cause her to think her romance has no longterm possibilities. 

More than the Taiwanese original, the film leans into the tropes of shojo manga along with the junai classics of the early 2000s in its supernaturally-tinged tale of tragic romance and impossible love. As such, the film has a nostalgic quality though its retro touchstones seem somewhat out of sync in its polaroid cameras and ‘50s-themed disco even if that itself may equally be a kind of reference to Back to the Future, though more than anything else it’s a tale of a miracle created by music bringing two lonely souls together. It may seem as if Minato is drawn towards death or something dark, but is in reality chasing himself and the melody of a life that’s lost to him, perhaps finally catching it and learning to play again only to find that the dance ends much too soon leaving only the barest echo of itself behind.

Secret: A Hidden Score screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

September 1923 (福田村事件, Tatsuya Mori, 2023)

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After the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake struck in 1923, it led to a period of hysteria in which in the natural disaster somehow became equated with the Korean Independence Movement, foreigners, and socialists and who were after all thorns in the side of rising nationalism. Documentarian Tatsuya Mori makes his narrative film debut with September, 1923 (福田村事件, Fukudamura Jiken) released to mark the 100th anniversary of the incident and focussing on a little known episode in which villagers turned on a small group of itinerant medicine pedlars they were convinced were not Japanese. 

In this case, at least, they were Burakumin. An oppressed underclass of their own, they too are divided in their views about Koreans some finding solidarity with them as another minority who is bullied and discriminated against while others are quick assert themselves as at least being above them on the pecking order cheerfully using slur words as they go. Shinsuke (Eita Nagayama), the leader of the troupe, laments that they have to live this way, tricking those worse off than themselves into buying their snake oil cures while explaining that though people will often help each other out when times are good, if survival’s on the line they’ll turn against each other. 

Perhaps that’s difficult to imagine in a small village of genial farmers, but militarism has already corrupted its gentle rhythms. Men from the village are fond of telling war stories from their time as conscripts in China or Russia, though one has a particular bee in his bonnet about wives being left lonely with husbands away overseas and is convinced that his father has slept with his wife. Another local woman was indeed having an affair shortly before her husband was killed in action and is then ostracised by the village for her transgressive behaviour becoming yet another oppressed minority. The village chief is keen on democracy and progressive in his way yet soon finds himself powerless against the local militia mostly comprised of old men with a lust for blood and glory. It’s this militarist hysteria that eventually proves tragedy as they find themselves desperate to identify “spies” and protect the village only to murder children and a pregnant woman who were just passing through. 

The absurdity extends to asking those suspected of being Non-Japanese to repeat a particular phrase difficult for Koreans in particular to pronounce, only those from other areas of Japan also pronounce it in a way that might seem “foreign” in Tokyo. Cornered by the militia, Shinsuke asks if it would be alright to kill him even if he were Korean, taking issue with the militia’s absurdist and racist rationale that decides someone must die because of the way they pronounced a certain word or seemed uncomfortable shouting “banzai” at the point of a sword. But one of the villagers unwittingly uncovers a since of guilt felt even by a man in a village miles away from anything that the Koreans have been bullied for years, this the understandable result of their rage boiling over and a moment of retribution. 

The film seems to suggest that the buck doesn’t really stop, except perhaps with the bystander who merely watches this horrifying violence and does nothing. Tomokazu (Arata Iura) has recently returned to the village after many years living in Korea bringing back with him a Korean wife but his marriage is falling apart due to his own guilt and trauma having been complicit in a Japanese atrocity. Watching the massacre unfold, his wife, Shizuko (Rena Tanaka), asks him if he’s just going to watch this time again but his attempt to intervene makes no difference. An idealistic news reporter meanwhile takes her boss to task for publishing propaganda headlines associating Koreans with crime and terrorism rather than real truth of what’s happening on the ground, asking him what the point of the press is if it won’t speak truth to power. But militarists do not listen to reason, and as the headman points out they will have to keep living with those who’ve committed these heinous acts. Sometimes a little on the nose with its symbolism such as a literal murder of hope in the killing of an unborn child, Mori’s otherwise poignant drama lacks the impact it strives for but nevertheless addresses a shocking moment of mass hysteria that is not quite as historical as we’d like to think.

September 1923 screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

We’re Millennials. Got a Problem? International (ゆとりですがなにか インターナショナル, Nobuo Mizuta, 2023)

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Seven years on from the hit TV series, the guys find themselves dealing with the problems of early middle age along with increasing internationalisation as members of the so-called Yutori generation in Nobuo Mizuta’s We’re Millennials Got a Problem? (ゆとりですがなにか インターナショナル, Yutori desu ga, naninka Internationa). Now they’re in a different place and increasingly confused by the youth of the day while reconsidering their own life choices and facing a series of impromptu crises.

Among them would be that both the yakiniku restaurant where the guys worked in the TV series and the company that used to distribute the sake produced by Masakazu’s (Masaki Okada) family brewery have been taken over by Korean conglomerates. To make matters worse, the company tells Masakazu at an online meeting he’s embarrassingly turned up to in person because no one thought to tell him it was remote that they’re shifting production entirely to makgeolli because no one drinks sake anymore and his takings are about to fall off a cliff. The only way he can keep the contract is by agreeing to introduce a new product, either makgeolli or alcohol free sake. 

Meanwhile, his friend Maribu (Yuya Yagira) has returned after seven years in China with a Chinese wife and three children but apparently no job prospects. Masakazu offers him a job at the brewery, forgetting that it’s a bit awkward because he used to date his sister, Yutori (Haruka Shimazaki), who has quit her corporate job to start a business selling nordic knickknacks. It’s Maribu’s live streaming of the moribund brewery that unwittingly exposes the cracks in Masakazu’s marriage when Chinese netizens starts sending aphrodisiacs through the post to help him overcome the problems of his sexless life with wife Akane (Sakura Ando) who is herself struggling with the demands of looking after two small children and taking care of all the domestic chores with no help.

Later Akane tells mutual friend Yamaji (Tori Matsuzaka) that she’s worried she has post-natal depression and is fed up with her home life. We see can how stressful it is in the opening sequence in which Masakazu (ironically) tries to become a YouTube sake star but is repeatedly heckled by offscreen calls from Akane asking him to bathe the children and otherwise help out before she finally has no choice but to bring the kids to him. When they go to city hall to apply for a place in childcare they’re immediately dismissed, Akane somehow told that she doesn’t have as many “points” as her husband even though they’re both self-employed and there are many more needy candidates before the (probably well-meaning) civil servant not so subtly checks their daughter’s arm for signs of abuse or neglect. It’s not that surprising therefore that when the aphrodisiacs start piling up at home she wonders if Masakzau’s having an affair placing further strain on the relationship. 

Shin-hye (Haruka Kinami), the Korean-Japanese-American CEO of the company that bought out their old distributor (for whom Akane was once a regional manager) also a expresses a similar anxiety about the place of women in the workplace on the one hand coming from Korean corporate culture and finding that Japan might not as be “as bad” at least in its every increasing list of harassment which at least admit there’s problem with workplace bullying, sexist culture, and unwanted sexual advances from men in positions of power. Yamaji, meanwhile, finds his well-meaning attempts to foster diversity in the classroom floundering when the kids declare themselves unable to understand the intricacies of LGTBQ issues explaining that at their age “dating” just means hanging out though they’re unexpectedly accepting of the Thai transfer student with an inexplicable crush on the incredibly obnoxious American boy who transferred in the same time as him. 

In other ways, however, Yamaji is the same as ever. On his first appearance he’s on an awkward date with a woman from a dating app which he largely spends talking to his mentor on an iPad and making sexist remarks. They are all struggling with the demands of a more concrete adulthood in which much is already decided while their settled lives are undermined by unexpected crisis from the fallout from the conravirus pandemic and ongoing economic malaise to marital discord, the demands of caring for small children, and a friend a they had no idea was a top star live-streaming star in China. A recurring gag sees people undertake zoom meetings dressed in a suit jacked with sweatpants underneath. Yutori eventually exclaims that there’s no point even having dream while her family have a lot of sensible questions about her new business like where all the stock is whether it was worth the risk leaving her stable job that was presumably subject to all the harassment and otherwise oppressive corporate culture of contemporary Japan. Nevertheless, the millennials eventually come to a kind to acceptance and understanding of where they are in their lives along with a re-appreciation of everything they already have.

We’re Millennials. Got a Problem? International screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Penalty Loop (ペナルティループ, Shinji Araki, 2024)

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Time loop cinema has made a resurgence in Japan of late, but Shinji Araki’s Penalty Loop (ペナルティループ) is not quite what you’d assume it to be rather a meditation on the grieving process in a constant process of recycling rage and hurt day after day. When his girlfriend is murdered and her body is found dumped in a local lake, Jun becomes obsessed with the idea of revenge and turns up at the killer’s place of work where he poisons his morning coffee and then stabs him to death in his car before poetically dumping his corpse in the same lake where disposed of Yui’s (Rio Yamashita) body.

The weird thing is, that Jun (Ryuya Wakaba) wakes up the next day to discover it’s still 6th June and he has to do the same thing all over again. Rather than switching up his methods, he simply repeats the process but it turns out the Killer (Yusuke Iseya) is also aware they’re trapped in a loop and starts trying to avoid being killed. Before too long, the men have begun to trauma bond over their shared despair of being trapped in this constant cycle of retribution and become almost friends in an absurdist, existential meditation on the fallacies of justice and revenge. The killer and his indirect victim are locked in this cycle together and, the film seems to suggest, can only escape it through a process of healing and forgiveness rather than Jun’s futile attempts at revenge by killing the killer over and over again.

It is though somewhat perplexing that Jun never asks the Killer why he killed Yui and shows no real curiosity in his motives only asking him if he killed a lot of people. Yui also seems to have been mixed up in a concurrent conspiracy which the film does not go into or was in fact locked into her only cycle of despair and futily as the Killer suggests in volunteering that Yui wanted to die anyway, telling him that she had nothing to live for and was filled with emptiness. Of course, perhaps it’s simply the case that a kind of justice has already taken place in the “real” world and that Jun already knows why Yui was killed but simply wants a more personal kind of revenge to satisfy his hurt and anger, or that the Killer would not really be able to tell him much anyway because we can’t be sure he’s “real” or just a character existing for the purpose of Jun’s revenge no different from a dummy punch bag.

A strange, grinning man (Jin Daeyeon) is often seen observing the two men and later becomes irate on hearing Jun state that he no longer plans to kill the Killer but seems to have befriended him instead. His presence hints at a wider authoritarian presence that feeds off Jun’s negative emotions and forces him to continue vengeance long after he has tired of it. At this point, his killings become less violent. Rather than the poison and a knife, the bloody struggle in the car and the clinical process of bagging the body to be dumped in a lake, Jun uses a gun and the Killer patiently allows himself to be killed so that the cycle can continue. Further revelations suggest that the loop is less cosmic than commercial and Jun is constrained by a contract he signed for something that is supposed to be a kind of therapy the ethics of which would be very debatable, as would the offer of a secondary “rehab” programme on his completion of the process though how he, a man with no apparent income who lives in a room that already resembles a prison where he builds model houses that express the life he might have liked to give Yui, would be able to afford all this.

In any case, it’s true enough that Jun is imprisoned by his grief and powerlessness and his desire for vengeance is an attempt to free himself though in the end he can only do it by abandoning his rage and violence and finding empathy for the killer with whom he is trapped in this hellish cycle of grief and retribution. Araki lends his quest a dystopian air, taking place largely in some kind of hydroponic facility which otherwise exists only for the purposes of Jun’s revenge. Strangely quirky in its absurdist humour and bleak in some of its implications the film otherwise suggests that forgiveness is the only path out of grief for the cycle of vengeance will never really end.

Penalty Loop screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

LONESOME VACATION (Atsuro Shimoyashiro, 2023)

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A rockabilly detective starts to realise that the most mysterious part of his case is his client in Atsuro Shimoyashiro’s quirky tale of buried histories and enduring images, Lonesome Vacation. Echoing amore distant past, the film reflects that some things you’re better off not knowing while those around us are often flawed beyond our imaging or else carrying painful secrets of their own they may not wish to share though more for the sake of others than themselves.

You might say that Eichi (Takuma Fujie) stands out with this 1950s quiff and retro get up, but it also allows him to hide in plain sight while carrying out his various jobs chasing cheaters and other kinds of surveillance work. But when he runs into old flame Kyoko (Kyoka Minakami) whom he briefly dated in college, she asks him to investigate a reel of film she deceived in among her late father’s belongings. The film seems to show her father with another woman, Reiko, whom Kyoko is keen to track down. 

Setting off on a roatrip that is as Eiji later says is almost like a vacation, the pair eventually start to grow closer and perhaps fall in love while trying to solve the mystery of the film. Kyoko’s father Miko, suggests in his voice over that film is a more ephemeral medium than video while simultaneously confessing that he wanted to capture a woman on film, to keep her in the present moment, in the knowledge that film will last longer than us. Miko describes it as a metaphor for life, his own and perhaps generally though it’s lost to us now. Kyoko searches for the answer to a puzzle her father died before telling her how to solve.

Piecing everything together, Eichi starts to realise that Mikio most likely had an affair and Kyoko may have a sibling though neither of them are very sure whether they should reveal themselves not wanting to create further trouble in their lives by announcing that their mother had an affair. Nevertheless, even after it seems like the original case has been resolved, Eichi realises he’s unable to solve the mystery of Kyoko. Having very briefly dated in uni, he doesn’t quite understand why she’s come to him now or really anything about her character or habits. She meanwhile seems to have taken a liking to him through their strange road trip during which everyone seems to regard them as a young couple very much in love.

Ironically enough, Eichi avows that it’s the image that matters but only after comes to understand the import of something he’s seen, little reasoning that sometimes relationships can be different than the image we have of them. Yet as he says, it’s image that’s really important, our thoughts and impressions of something as disctivt from their physical presence along with the absences within them that provoke our imaginations. Kyoko gets some answers if perhaps not the ones she’s was looking for but is also left with unavoidable gaps because those who could have filled them in are no longer able to do so.

Shimoyashiro gets good milage out of the retro quality of Eichi’s outfit and hairstyle along the absurdity of a rockabilly detective but also gives him an almost Kindaichi-esque sense of goodness, too diffident to pursue Kyoko even after beginning to realise that she seems to be flirting with him. Slightly more dejected than he is, Kyoko insists that one day simply follows another but that also kindness is what gives life its meaning. In a way, it’s what gives the image value too in a kind of selflessness that placed no ownership over its subject and was content to let it roam where it chose. Taking place largely in the surprisingly romantic environs of Jogashima, the film has a charmingly old-fashioned quality even in its central slow burn romance along wth a genuine sense of worth and authenticity even if its main subject turns out to be the melancholy echoes of a lost love or at least the image of it enduring long after the lovers themselves have departed,

LONESOME VACATION screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ichiko (市子, Akihiro Toda, 2023)

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If for some reason your name were taken from you and it became much easier to live by some other person’s name that you were compelled to use, would you be content to be them or be prepared to go to extreme lengths to reclaim your own identity? Based on his own play, Akihiro Toda’s Ichiko (市子) explores similar themes to his 2018 film The Name as the absent heroine fights to reassert herself just as we try to piece her together to a create semblance of the whole being we may never truly understand.

In many ways, it’s absence that defines Ichiko (Hana Sugisaki) who like the mysterious spirit of a fairy tale must be gone as soon as she is seen. Or at least, you could forgive Yoshinori (Ryuya Wakaba) for feeling this way when his girlfriend of three years suddenly disappears soon after he’d presented her with marriage papers. It’s not until he’s visited by a policeman, Goto (Shohei Uno), sometime later that he’s forced to admit he actually knew very little about her. He assumed she’d had a difficult past, and neither of them said too much about themselves so he doesn’t know if her parents are still alive, where she was from, or if she has any family or friends she might have gone to. What shocks him most, however, is that Goto informs him that on paper at least the woman named Ichiko Kawabe does not exist.

Flashing back across several years from Ichiko’s childhood to the present day, we see people call her by another name which she often tries to correct telling them that her name is Ichiko but it isn’t originally clear to us if this is because she’s being forced to live under false name or if she merely dislikes the name she was given and wishes to be “Ichiko” instead. In any case, she appears to have developed a healthy fear of letting anyone in thanks to her incredibly disordered home life. At times, would-be friends attempt to visit, but are either kicked out or merely horrified by what they see there and leave soon afterwards putting an end to the friendship. That might in itself explain why she may wish to be someone else, but in fact what she wants is the right to be herself.

Gradually it becomes clear that because of the way Japanese society works, Ichiko has been forced to live two lives as one and can live neither fully. It’s not quite right to call it a double life or to say that she multiple personalities but more that she cannot quite locate herself within herself and is increasingly distressed in being forced to answer to a name which is not her own and live someone else’s life for them. Later she explains that all she wanted was a “normal” existence though this is the very thing denied her in part because she is denied her rightful identity though there is something quite poignant in her remaining innocence. Her touching description of finding happiness in the scent of miso soup wafting from ordinary houses at dinner time expresses her desire for the comfort and safety of a conventional family she never really had or may perhaps have experienced for a brief moment in early childhood. 

Ironically enough, she exclaims that she likes walking in the rain because it washes everything clean though for her it will spell disaster in quite literally revealing the skeletons buried in her past and with them exposing the precarious web of lies on which her adult life was based in an attempt solely to recapture the authenticity of her essential identity. A further irony may be that the identity she ends up with may not even be her own but that of someone else who decided they no longer wanted theirs, perhaps because the world had also been unkind to them and so they did not understand its worth. As the policeman says, she did what she had to do survive whether that be lying about who she was or otherwise burying her other self literally or metaphorically. Dark and melancholy, Toda’s twisty psychological mystery has its poignant qualities but ultimately asks whether living as your true self is worth the price or it’s better just to accept the name that fate and society have dealt you.

Ichiko screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)