All these years later, it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary the wheezy, breezy youthfulness of the French New Wave was. Kuro proves that there’s life in this whimsical, summer seaside feeling yet as three misfits find themselves holing up at a disused small hotel to think about what they’ve done until they learn to grow up a little.
Kuro starts our story as she mournfully chows down on some of the pastries at the bakery she works at whilst treating a customer in a very disdainful way. She wanted to be a baker but her boss never really lets her do anything and when they argue about her guzzling half the stock she quits in a fit of pique. Roaming around the city doing absurd things like partying with a jazz band before running off with their change can or messing around with a sharp suited guy in a hotel room she meets womanising stage actor Gou who’s had a tiff with his actress wife after paying to much attention to the new girl. He flirts with and eventually semi-kidnaps Kuro for a road trip where they meet photographer Eito who has also had a tiff with his woman over having neglected to file the marriage papers at city hall. He’s heading up to an old hotel his uncle used to own where he was meant to spend his honeymoon and invites Gou and Kuro to join him.
Kuro’s original Japanese title, はなればなれに “Hanarebanare ni” literally means “scattered pieces” and was, coincidentally, the same title used for Godard’s 1964 masterpiece Bande à part. First time director Daisuke Shimote wears his influences on his sleeve with an atmosphere that recalls early period Godard which is all whimsy minus Godard’s slightly arch, confrontational irony. Leading lady Kuro, played by Airi Kido, has a definite touch of Anna Karina running through her from the way her retro haircut neatly frames her child-like face to her striped top and colourful red skirt. Taking her cue from Karina’s innocent insouciance, her absurd, pixyish pranks take on a cute and quirky quality which is backed up by a youthfully punkish disregard for the normal order of things.
Kido dances with the jazz band like Karina dancing in the bar in Vivre sa Vie and the gang even fake die in a water gun and finger shoot out a la Franz and Arthur in Bande à part. There’s also something of Tati in the intricate way Shimote sets up what are actually quite small and simple jokes like the Wii tennis match that suddenly turns into an entirely different kind of “virtual” game. At this point, the photographer who’s been perpetually on the sidelines, observing, finds himself joining in and experiencing his very own Natasha at the dance moment which, perhaps, finally allows him to break through something that’s been causing a rift in his personal life.
Through their season at the sea, each of these disparate characters comes to a kind of personal realisation that leaves them, well, more or less the same but much more settled. Kuro learns that sometimes you just have to buckle down and do as you’re told, Gou perhaps learns to be nicer to his wife and Eito maybe realises that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s leaving you. Each of the characters is quite depressed, in the best new wave tradition, or just filled with ennui but perhaps you can’t have these kinds of absurd adventures in any other mood. That said, the heavier side of new wave surrealism with its nihilistic overtones is almost entirely absent leaving the atmosphere light and bright with the feeling that everything will (probably) be alright in the end.
Light on conventional narrative and high on sight gags and surrealist humour, Daisuke Shimote has crafted a charming and amusing new wave inspired ensemble comedy that, yes, wears its influences on its sleeves but isn’t afraid to bring its own moves to the dance floor. It might seem a little bit like a curveball from someone who’s spent so much of his previous life studying the work of Ozu with his formalist compositions and inclusory tatami mat viewpoint, but then Ozu was also a master of subtlety who could make peeling an apple into one of the most profoundly moving scenes in cinema history and Shimote is able to harness a similar fastidiousness here only in more of a comedic bent. Charming, whimsical, absurd but absolutely internally consistent, cinematically literate and beautifully made Kuro is one of the most impressive feature length debuts of recent times and hints at a promising career for its still inexperienced director.
Bonus videos of people (mostly Anna Karina) dancing in Godard films:
Starting as he meant to go on, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s debut feature film is the story of two slackers, each aimlessly drifting through life without a sense of purpose or trajectory in sight. His humour here is even drier than in his later films and though the tone is predominantly sardonic, one can’t help feeling a little sorry for his hapless, lonely “heroes” trapped in their vacuous, empty lives.
If there’s one thing you can say about the work of Japan’s great comedy master Koki Mitani, it’s that he knows his cinema. Nowhere is the abundant love of classic cinema tropes more apparent than in 2008’s The Magic Hour (ザ・マジックアワー) which takes the form of an absurdist meta comedy mixing everything from American ‘20s gangster flicks to film noir and screwball comedy to create the ultimate homage to the golden age of the silver screen.
The world of the classical “jidaigeki” or period film often paints an idealised portrait of Japan’s historical Edo era with its brave samurai who live for nothing outside of their lord and their code. Even when examining something as traumatic as forbidden love and double suicide, the jidaigeki generally presents them in terms of theatrical tragedy rather than naturalistic drama. Whatever the cinematic case may be, life in Edo era Japan could be harsh – especially if you’re a woman. Enjoying relatively few individual rights, a woman was legally the property of her husband or his clan and could not petition for divorce on her own behalf (though a man could simply divorce his wife with little more than words). The Tokeiji Temple exists for just this reason, as a refuge for women who need to escape a dangerous situation and have nowhere else to go.
When 21 year old Hitomi Kanehara’s Snakes and Earrings (蛇にピアス, Hebi ni Piasu) was published back in 2003 it took the coveted Akutagawa prize for literature and the country by storm. Its scandalous depictions of the dark and nihilistic sex life of its outsider youngsters outraged and fascinated enough people to get it onto the best seller lists and earn a cinematic adaptation from Japan’s top theatre director Yukio Ninagawa in only his second foray into the world of moving pictures. However, Snakes and Earrings is perhaps that rare instance of an adaptation which clings to closely to its source material as its detached, emotionless and straightforward approach end in something of a miss fire.
In writing the original novel which inspired Heavenly Homecoming to Stars, Choi In-ho stated that he wanted to tell the story of “a woman whom a city killed”. The novel itself was first serialised in a newspaper where it quickly became a must read and popular discussion point among readers of all ages. It’s perhaps less surprising then that this completely radical film adaptation by first time director Lee Jang-ho proved to be the big cinema hit of 1974. A new “youth culture” movement was beginning inspired by social and political developments from overseas and there was a growing appetite for films and novels which were equally revolutionary. Heavenly Homecoming to Stars managed to provide this but also, crucially, was able to appeal to older age ranges too thanks to its re-imagining of classical melodrama.
The late Ken Takakura is best remembered as cinema’s original hard man but when the occasion arose he could provoke the odd tear or two just the same. 1999’s Poppoya (鉄道員) directed by frequent collaborator Yasuo Furuhata sees him once again playing the tough guy with a battered heart only this time he’s an ageing station master of a small town in deepest snow country which was once a prosperous mining village but is now a rural backwater.
There are nine million bicycles in Beijing (going by the obviously very accurate source of a chart topping song) but there are 11.5 million inhabitants so that’s at least two million people who do not own a bike. Still, if you’re in the unlucky position of having your bike stolen by one of the aforementioned two million, your chances of finding it again are slim. Luckily for the protagonist of Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (十七岁的单车, Shí Qī Suì de Dānchē), he manages to track his down through sheer perseverance though even once he gets hold of it again his troubles are far from over.
Sometimes, just like an aimless drifter wandering into town, you feel as if you’ve come in during the second reel and missed some vital piece of information leaving you feeling a little at odds with the current situation. So it is with Buichi Saito’s The Rambling Guitarist (ギターを持った渡り鳥, Guitar wo Motta Wataridori) which is, apparently, the first film in a series though feels a little more like the second.
No fate but what we make – to steal the lines from another film just as one of the heavenly scriptwriters might in the latest film from the prolific Japanese director SABU (otherwise known as the actor Hiroyuki Tanaka), Chasuke’s Journey (天の茶助, Ten no Chasuke). Adapting his own novel for the screen (though the book was actually published after the film was completed), Sabu creates a romantic fantasy in which a lowly tea boy from heaven descends to Earth on a quest to save the woman he loves from certain death.
Windows on Worlds 