Category: The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2024

The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Shingo Matsumura, 2022)

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A young woman with a growing desire for independence is thrown into turmoil by a totally unexpected diagnosis of cancer in Shingo Matsumura’s gentle coming-of-age tale and maternal drama, The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Atsui Munasawagi). Perhaps because of her youth, the heroine finds herself struggling not with a fear of pain or death but of being unsexed while preoccupied with what it might mean for the rest of her life if she were to lose her breasts at such an early age.

It seems that Chinatsu (Mizuki Yoshida) has had a particular hangup about her chest size since the onset of puberty when her mother, Akiko (Tokiko Tokiwa), first refused to buy her a bra, making her wait a year longer than the other girls and leaving her with a sense of embarrassment that might be out of keeping with her age. One of the things that most bothered her about the doctors visits is that she was treated by a middle-aged man who was then the first person ever to touch her breasts which is something she’s unhappy about while also feeling insecure that she’s never had a proper boyfriend and might never get one if it turns out she needs a mastectomy. As it turns out, she’s carrying a torch for childhood friend Ko (Daiken Okudaira), an aspiring actor, but is too shy to say anything especially with this threat to her sense of femininity hanging over her. Of course, it doesn’t help that the doctors are asking her to make advance decisions about things an 18-year-old wouldn’t usually consider such as if and when she might want children because her feelings about her fertility might affect her treatment options. 

Then again, it’s also true that she remains trapped in adolescence resentful when her mother tells her not to worry she’ll make all the decisions but also perhaps relieved. A little sick of their co-dependency she’d been thinking of moving out though it seems difficult to believe she’d be able to afford rent with just her part-time job while studying full-time at university. But when her mother shows a little interest in an incredibly awkward man at work it sends her in the other direction, now feeling resentful and rejected while fearing the loss of their familial intimacy given it had just been the two of them for so long after her father’s death when she was four.

Motoharu (Masaki Miura) accidentally demonstrates the entrenched sexism of the world around them when he makes a misogynistic joke as an attempt at an icebreaker when introduced as the boss at the factory where Akiko works. It later comes to light that he left his last job due to an accusation of sexual assault, and though it turns out to have been a misunderstanding highlights a lack of awareness in the working environment that feeds in to Chinatsu’s ongoing preoccupation with her femininity and the elusiveness of romance. Her homework assignment over the summer holidays is to write a story about her first love, a topic which might be seen as bordering on inappropriate, perhaps discriminatory against those who do not feel romantic desire not to mention that Chinatsu is only 18 so it is only natural that she is still in the process of figuring things out and cannot be expected to have much of a perspective on what is to her still a fairly recent (in fact ongoing) event. 

Meanwhile, her mother and Motoharu are each feeling a pang of regret that they always let things pass them by like the arrival of the circus, destined to be in town for a limited time only so it’s best to catch it while you can. Unfortunately that’s easier said than done especially when not everyone’s on the same page. The lump in Chinatsu’s heart is her yearning for romantic love, though she still lacks the courage to be honest with her feelings even if it’s helped her repair her relationship with her mother. An unexpected piece of compassionate advice also helps her begin to re-imagine her femininity in accepting that the loss of her breasts might not mean that she’s destined to be alone forever nor undeserving of romantic love symbolically dissolving the lump in her heart in allowing her to move forward with her life no matter what the future might hold.

The Lump in My Heart screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles

Shadow of Fire (ほかげ, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2023)

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The ruins of a firebombed city become a purgatorial space haunted by tortured souls who cannot escape the traumatic wartime past in Shinya Tsukamoto’s eerie voyage through post-war Japan, Shadow of Fire (ほかげ, Hokage). Even the small boy (Ouga Tsukao) who desperately looks for a place to belong is plagued by nightmares of the flames that took his home and family while it otherwise seems that those around him live their lives in the shadow of a war which for many is still far from over. 

This state of ruination is immediately brought home to us by the heightened presence of sound. Not only do the cicadas buzz amid the scorching heat of an oppressive summer, but we constantly hear the sound of people walking over rubble or the clinking of broken glass. The unnamed woman we first meet (Shuri) lives in a room behind a small bar which appears to have scorch marks across the fusuma, a dank and dingy place filled with hopelessness and despair. The woman herself has a vacant look, a little dead behind the eyes either numbed with the sake a neighbourhood man brings her as pretext for extracting sexual favours or simply too tired of life to think much about it. Though she technically runs a bar, it’s more of a front for her only means of supporting herself, casual sex work, though as later becomes apparent she too may have been slow poisoned not only by the war but it’s immediate aftermath and the lingering traumas of those left behind and those who returned. 

The boy who eventually comes to stay with her remarks that those who did not come back did not turn into scary people, if they were somehow lucky to have escaped this purgatorial hellscape. Later he wanders through the black market and discovers an abandoned tunnel filled with returned soldiers who stare out at him with vacant eyes sitting with eerie stillness like dormant zombies. He spots a man among them that he knew well, a young soldier (Hiroki Kono) who had been a teacher before he was drafted and took a maths textbook with him to war as a kind of talisman that reminded him he’d survive and teach again. The soldier had formed an odd kind of family unit with the woman and the boy, almost as if the husband she lost in the war and son who died in the firebombing, had been returned to her but his trauma refuses to set him free surfacing in moments of unexpected violence that hint at war’s realities. 

Later the boy meets another man with a traumatic past though one who sees himself as both victim and villain, resentful towards himself and the militarist regime that convinced him to betray his humanity and do dreadful, terrible things in its service. Tellingly this man, Shuji (Mirai Moriyama), is the only one granted a name. Perhaps names are only for the living, there’s a part of Shuji that is painfully alive a way that others aren’t even as he fixes his sights on his revenge as if it would somehow restore the humanity that was taken from him. Completing his quest, he lets down his hair and proclaims that for him at least the war is finally over. His commander, meanwhile, appears to have been living a fairly nice and successful life reminding him that he should stop dwelling on the past because it was after all a war and such things are only to be expected.

Shuji uses the boy in a way that seems counterproductive, taking advantage of the gun he’d found to help him take revenge on war. The woman tries to change the boy’s path, instructing him not to steal but to work honestly for his pay and to try to be better than this infinitely corrupted world. He wanted to be her protector, in his way acting as guide trying to free those around him from the purgatorial space of ruin and destitution but when he asks a medicine seller if he can exchange his money for something that will cure sickness he is told it’s not enough. He then tries to buy a dress for the woman, as if anticipating the salvation through consumerism that will eventually arrive though the constant sound of gunshots from the black market might indicate that for some at least there’s only one way out. The old man who visits the woman explains that he only approaches the ones who look okay, but that in the end you never really know. Shot in the half light or caught from behind the previously friendly take on an almost demonic intensity, wandering ghosts or broken souls already half consumed by the flames that in their minds at least are still burning and casting their shadows over the scorched earth of a traumatised society.

Shadow of Fire screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Undercurrent (アンダーカレント, Rikiya Imaizumi, 2023)

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Part way through Rikiya Imaizumi’s adaptation of the Testuyua Toyoda manga Undercurrent (アンダーカレント) a detective asks his client what she thinks it means to “understand” someone. Of course, she doesn’t really have an answer, and the film seems to suggest there isn’t one because we are forever strangers to ourselves let alone anyone else. We do things without knowing why or that somehow surprise us, while the actions of others can an also be be worryingly opaque. But then perhaps you don’t really need to “know” someone in order to “understand” them and as someone else later says perhaps it’s true enough that most people don’t really want the truth but a comforting illusion. 

But then Kanae’s (Yoko Maki) illusions aren’t exactly comforting. Her husband of four years Satoru (Eita Nagayama) suddenly disappeared during a work trip a year previously and has not been heard from since. She turns the television off when the news announces details of a decomposing body discovered near a set of electrical pylons, but on another level she’s sure that Satoru is alive and chose to leave her for reasons she can’t understand. Kanae tells a friend that what pains her most is thinking that in the end she wasn’t a person Satoru felt he could share his worries with so she was powerless to help him. Then again, there’s something in Kanae that is equally closed off, a little distant and otherworldly as if she were also putting up a front to keep her true self submerged.

The detective (Lily Franky), whose name is “Yamasaki” yet allows people call him “Yamazaki” because it’s easier for them, says of Satoru that his “cheerful,” ever smiling nature may also have been a kind of masking designed to dissuade people from looking any deeper. Someone else admits that they lied mostly to fit in, be what others wanted them to be, only to be caught out by the gulf between their genuine feelings and and the ever expanding web of their lies. Caught in a kind of suspended animation uncertain if Satoru will ever return and if and how she should continue with her life, Kanae ends up taking in a new assistant at her family bathhouse. Hori (Arata Iura) is the polar opposite of the way her husband is described, silent, soulful and somehow sad. We might be suspicious of him, his arrival seems too coincidental and the way he looks at some children running past in the town perhaps worrying. Yet how can we judge based only on his silence knowing nothing else of his history? Nevertheless, he may understand Kanae much better than anyone would suspect and may be the comforting presence from her recurring nightmares.

In her dreams, she’s plunged into water with a pair of hands around her neck. Unknowingly, Hori asks her if she’s ever really wanted to die and she can’t answer him even if it seems to us that the dreams reflect her desire for death, to be submerged in a sea of forgetfulness. Yet we later learn they come to have another meaning reflecting her long buried trauma and the reason for her own listlessness. These are the undercurrents that run silently through her, waves of guilt and grief that obscure all else. Disappearances have happened around her all life and seem only to increase, another bath house owner seemingly disappearing after a fire having promised to sell her his boiler. Yet through her experiences, she comes to fear them less reflecting that anyone could leave at any moment and that’s alright, as Hori had said nothing’s really forever. 

Even so, she regrets that there couldn’t have been more emotional honesty from the beginning then perhaps no one would need to disappear without a word. Confessions are made and the air is cleared. Someone had said that no one wanted the truth, but it seems Kanae has chosen it as perhaps symbolised in her decision to call Yamasaki by his actual name rather than the one he allows people to use because it’s too much trouble to correct them. Aside from his multiple names, Yamasaki is a strange man who holds meetings in karaoke boxes and theme parks though perhaps because he simply thinks Kanae could use a little cheering up. In more ways than one, it’s the ones left behind who are left in the dark, but they may be able to find their way out of it with a little more light and reflection.

Screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Twilight Cinema Blues (銀平町シネマブルース, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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Japan’s mini theatres have been in a status of crisis since the pandemic. Already struggling under the weight of changing times the immediate restrictions pushed many over the edge unable to entice older regulars back into screens or find a new audience among the young. This is doubly bad news for the industry as a whole as it’s mini theatres that allow indie films the platform they need to succeed and without them there is little avenue for films produced outside of the mainstream. Like Lim Kah-Wai’s Your Lovely Smile, Hideo Jojo’s Twilight Cinema Blues (銀平町シネマブルース, Ginpeicho Cinema Blues) similarly extols the virtues of the mini theatre which is not just somewhere to watch films but a place to belong that has room for anyone and everyone that wants to be there.

That’s more than true for Takeshi (Keisuke Koide), a struggling man approaching middle age who’s become near destitute and is almost sucked into a welfare scam targeting the homeless by a pair of shady yakuza claiming they run an NPO. At the orientation he runs into Kajiwara (Mitsuru Fukikoshi ), the owner of a mini theatre who declines to join the gangsters’ scheme but offers Takeshi the opportunity to bunk in his storeroom while working part-time little knowing that to Takeshi this particular mini cinema is like a return to source allowing him to rediscover his love of film.

But the mini cinema itself is also struggling. They simply don’t get bums on seats and Kajiawa is behind on paying his staff. Though they have a small collection of regulars, they aren’t enough to keep the lights on on their own. Even the projectionist is thinking he’ll probably retire along with the machine. Unable to afford new films, Kajiawara relies on cheap and easily licensable classics such as old favourite Casablanca but is largely unable to see away out of his situation while feeling guilty over ending what was effectively a family business and local landmark. The building’s 60th anniversary, 60 being a symbolic number in Japanese culture as it represents a full turn of the Chinese zodiac and literal new start, presents an opportunity to both Kajiawara and Takeshi to begin to move forward by renewing their faith in cinema.

The faith of Takeshi’s homeless friend Sato (Shohei Uno) needed no renewing. Though he had nothing, the ability to see a film twice a month made him feel human while the community at the cinema is perhaps the only one that still accepts him. He offers a small prayer after every film, and instructs Takeshi that he should the same. But his openhearted faith is also his undoing, allowing him to fall for the yakuza scam little realising they’ll force him to work for them taking half of the social security payments they helped him sign up for in the process. In the outside world, men like Sato find only exploitation and prejudice with cinema their only refuge.

Then again, filmmaking isn’t easy. A young woman who desperately wanted her debut film to play in her hometown cinema has based her first feature on the life of her father, a failed film director who drank himself to death (in a neat allusion to Oshima’s Cruel Story of Youth, her film’s title literally translates as “cruel story of a director”). Similarly, the suicide of a much loved assistant director has prevented those around him from moving on, preoccupied with the shock his death caused them in its suddenness and lack of obvious cause. They blame themselves sending their lives into a downward spiral that results in crushing financial debts and the end of a marriage. In some ways, the film is an ode to the ADs who keep everything running, including on occasions the director, and are in a sense the custodians of filmmaking.

Still, it’s clear that not everything can seamlessly repaired. Times have moved on even if some have been left behind and you can’t always simply reclaim what you’ve lost, but you can always start again with another spin of the wheel and make the most of what you’ve got. It won’t be the same, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be good. Jojo’s heartwarming tale of cinema has an undercurrent of darkness and despair running beneath, but also suggests that the silver screen can be a beacon hope when the world is at its bleakest and not least for those whose existence largely lies behind it.

Screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles)