Category: Japan

A generational divide echoes around a beer hall filled with a defeated sense of bonhomie until finally finding a point of rest in Tomu Uchida’s elliptical single set drama, Twilight Saloon (たそがれ酒場, Tasogare Sakaba). The melancholy title captures the feeling of finality which seems to overhang the bar but equally the shift that is taking place as the old must decide whether they will allow the young to be free or forever trap them with the legacy of their own mistakes. 

The tensions are obvious as a once feared military colonel nicknamed “Demon” Onitsuka (Eijiro Tono) strides into the bar cutting a slim, anxious figure evidently a shadow of his former self. Puffing out his chest, he lives on memories of past glory claiming that though he may now be a lowly estate agent, he will rise again should the occasion call and will never lose his soldier’s spirit. Kibe (Daisuke Kato), a regular at the bar, is excited to run into him, his former commanding officer, and evidently still holds Onitsuka in some esteem but the pair of them seem ridiculous, even a little pitiable, as relics of the wartime generation unable to move into the post-war era. Onitsuka has a minor apoplexy when the table of students across from them begin singing a communist song explaining it as evidence of the absence of morality in the contemporary society. Somewhat embarrassingly, he and Kibe begin singing along to what they thought was a classic military ballad sung by someone outside only to abruptly realise that it is the communists once again. Strapped for cash, Onitsuka makes an abrupt exit leaving a confused Kibe to chase after him yelling “put it on my tab.” 

“Put it on my tab” might as well be the life philosophy of regular patron Umeda (Isamu Kosugi) who unlike Onitsuka and Kibe is wracked with guilt over his wartime experiences and has dedicated the remainder of his life to making amends by paying it forward. Once a famous painter, he feels he sullied his art by wilfully depicting warfare in a manner that sought to glorify it and may have led others astray ultimately costing them their lives. Umeda feels he no longer has a right to practice his art and has made a sacrifice of it in atonement, his earnestness leant a poignant quality by the fact that he is played by Isamu Kosugi who had himself starred in a propaganda film co-produced by Nazi Germany. 

Yet he’s far from the only one who’s abandoned or compromised his art because of what he sees as a moral failing. All knowing, Umeda recounts the history of accompanist Eto (Hiroshi Ono) who he claims once lives under a different name and returned from abroad to found a revolutionary opera company only to be betrayed by his protégé who left to set up his own revolutionary company taking Eto’s wife with him. Eto later stabbed her in jealously and like Umeda has lived the rest of his life in quiet contemplation slumming it in this backstreet bar while training up a new protégé, Kenichi (Takuya Miyahara), said to be the son of a former bandmate. Eto is a vision of defeat, Umeda remarking that his time has most likely come, walking around in a Russian tunic unable to let go of the past. Emi (Keiko Tsushima) is much the same. Once a promising ballet dancer she feels she’s lost the right to dance after becoming a stripper apparently because of a bad man who later breaks into the bar and slashes her arm with a knife echoing Eto’s dark crime of passion. 

This might in part be why she is so keen to ensure that Eto will not prevent Ken from taking advantage of a valuable opportunity because of his own jealousy and resentment. The offer comes from Nakaoji, the leader of a national opera group and the man who once betrayed Eto though as the snippy “intellectuals” at another table point out he may once have been a “revolutionary” but is now an old man and has in effect become the establishment. The dilemma brings things full circle, the generational divide which once existed between master and pupil has now been eclipsed by a turn of the wheel. Eto cannot help but recognise Nakaoji, the cause of all his suffering, but Nakaoji does not acknowledge him and after all he has another name. 

Umeda pleads with him to allow Kenichi to go, not to ruin his life in the same way his was ruined by holding on to his pettiness and resentment as the man who took all from him returns to take his surrogate son too. His call is to those of his generation who bear the responsibility for wartime folly that they should accept that the world now belongs to the young and it is their duty to nurture them while setting them free to pursue their own destiny. The young customers in the bar are universally cheerful, still drunk on the exuberance of youth while those a little older are mostly defeated and melancholy, meditating on their own failed revolutions unable to move forward or let go of the past. 

Yet the youngsters who work there aren’t quite so happy, barmaid Yuki (Hitomi Nozoe) caught between the posturing of current and former gangster boyfriends while simultaneously discovering that her mother has been taken ill. She lost her father in the war and her home to the bombing and claims she has nothing other than the love of Masumi (Ken Utsui), a young tough who wants her to abandon her mother and schoolgirl sister to go with him to Osaka. Umeda adds 3000 yen to his tab, Yuki’s monthly salary, when the manager vacillates over granting her request for an advance to pay for her mother’s medical care seeing as they no longer even have rice at home. Later he runs into an old journalist friend who simply gives him the same amount of money from his wallet as if it were mere pocket change. The fact that Yuki doesn’t go with Masumi is not because she is afraid to or constrained by the burden of her family but an active choice to embrace her responsibility to others over her personal desire much as Umeda has already been doing. 

This maybe a twilight place, peopled by the hopeless and downtrodden, but there’s life here in all of its confusing randomness. A young man at one point runs in and jumps over the balcony to the stairs eventually chased by an older one, an incident otherwise unexplained just like the minor argument between a woman clutching a cat and the man who may be a patron of sorts who also brush through the bar. Uchida gives the snobbish left-wing intellectuals quite a kicking in their pithy discussions about existentialism and mocking of the students for trying to actually do something rather than just talk about it even if it’s singing in the street. Shot as if the action were unfolding in real time, the camera floats around the saloon as if it were itself a ghost lighting on the small moments of action that contribute to the incongruously warm atmosphere before ending up more or less where it started with a man singing on stage to an empty room. Even so, it does it with equal measures of hope and melancholy as age quite literally retreats and surrenders the space those who may still fill it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)