Piece of Atom (アトムの欠片, Takuya Koda, 2021)

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A teenage boy attempts to come to terms with grief following the sudden death of his parents in Takuya Koda’s nostalgic youth drama, Piece of Atom (アトムの欠片, Atom no Kakera). Quite clearly influenced by the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi, Koda’s summertime drama contemplates transience and eternity in insisting that nothing’s ever really gone forever and that we leave traces of ourselves wherever we go that may be picked up by anyone able to discern them. 

Teenager Ryo is very into science and particularly interested in the nature of the atom. He lives with his parents and much older sister Shiho in a small flat in Tokyo, but when his mother and father are killed in a car accident he is forced to move to a house the family owned in the country which is in a state of disrepair. At around 30, Shiho does her best to create a stable environment for her brother as they work together to repair their home but there’s also strange ethereality in her behaviour that suggests she’s trying to prepare him for an early adolescence. 

Neither of them seem to know very much about their parents’ pasts or why it is they have this house which obviously has not been visited in many years. Yet soon after his arrival, Ryo begins to encounter a strange phenomenon in which he almost breathes in floating memories of his father which begin to illuminate the parts of his parents’ lives which had remained hidden from him. He attributes this to the presence of his father’s “atoms” which he shed while, as Ryo discovers, he lived in the area as a student. Later he comes to the realisation that some of his father’s atoms survive in him as well as in everything he ever touched or came into contact with and that he might also posses the atoms of famous historical figures forever connecting him to the great confluence of humanity comforted by the knowledge that his parents did not simply disappear from the world and parts of them will forever remain within it. 

Meanwhile, he’s also a city boy trying to adapt to life in the country. His first shock is that his school is so small that there are no grades, all the children are being taught together. In any case he quickly makes a friend with local boy Ken, who shares his love of tokusatsu hero “Woodman”, setting up a secret base for them both in an abandoned car on a local dump. Ryo fights with his sister over personal privacy, irritated by her tendency to tidy his room without warning like any teenage boy might be, while struggling to define his idea of family now that there are only two of them. Before he died, Ryo had wanted to ask his father who had penned a book on the subject why atoms are round and how they hold together only to get a partial answer through one of his visions which is echoed by Shiho’s explanation that it’s his feelings which hold her together as if his unwillingness to let her go literally binds her atoms in their current form. 

Yet as she also points out, atoms may be eternal but people are not and she cannot stay with him forever. Echoing the work of Nobuhiko Obayashi, Kudo’s dialogue is often theatrical and self-reflective, while he makes surprising use of green screen and special effects to lend a note of unreality to the world around Ryo as he embarks on a journey of self-discovery across a timeless and nostalgic summer. The atoms he refers to are less physical particles, though clearly that too, than fragments of memory littered over a landscape as a kind of proof of life. Like a snail trail of human existence, they are evidence of the traces left behind by those who have gone allowing Ryo to come to a greater understanding of his parents while learning to let them go in order to move forward with his life. An affecting coming-of age-tale, Kudo’s occasionally psychedelic drama repurposes the atom as an embodiment of memory and feeling, a force that preserves its integrity while allowing its young hero to find an accommodation with loss through the contemplation of eternity. 

Piece of Atom screened as part of the 2022 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Akira Kurosawa, 1991)

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“People do forget everything, and quickly too” a teenage girl laments preparing to meet her half-American uncle and feeling a little awkward having been admonished by her parents for inadvertently confronting him with the realities of the wartime past. The middle generation in Kurosawa’s tri-generational tale of the legacy of warfare Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲, Hachigatsu no Rhapsody) have it seems an ambivalent attitude they’re in the process of imparting to their children that views talk of the atomic bomb as almost taboo, tiptoeing around it with their newfound American relatives lest they offend them but mostly out of a desire for economic gain that reflects an early post-war mentality almost entirely alien to their Bubble-era teenage kids.

It’s the children who are keenest to learn about their past, staying with their elderly and seemingly frail grandmother Kane (Sachiko Murase) over the summer while their parents have travelled to Hawaii to investigate after receiving a letter from Kane’s long lost younger brother Suzujiro who emigrated in the 1920s and has since become a wealthy man running a pineapple plantation. The problem is that Kane had a large number of siblings, at least 11, and honestly doesn’t remember one called Suzujiro who did after all leave the country 60 years previously and was never seen again. The children, Tadao (Hisashi Igawa) and Yoshie (Toshie Negishi), think her refusal to visit him in Hawaii is partly down to a lingering resentment for the dropping of the atomic bomb which killed her husband, but as she later tells the grandchildren that was 45 years ago and she no longer has any strong feelings either way about the Americans adding only that it was all the fault of the war.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that Kane lives with a sense of loss and the continuing trauma of witnessing the flash that is expressed by the bald spot on the back of her head. As the grandchildren ask her questions she begins to reflect more on the past, remembering a younger brother, Suzukichi, who witnessed the flash with her and later had some kind of breakdown locking himself away endlessly drawing pictures of eyes that she later explains mimicked that of the flash itself. Kurosawa depicts this memory with surrealist imagery, a red sky splitting open just as Kane described exposing an eye which seemed to stare down at them. Youngest grandson Shinjiro (Mitsunori Isaki) draws such an eye on the blackboard in the study room in his grandmother’s house, an eye which continues to observe the children as they contemplate the recent past as well as an older Japan exemplified by their grandmother’s tales of the water imp living in a nearby pool who might once have saved Suzukichi’s life. 

In some ways, it’s almost as if the middle generation has been passed over. The grandchildren are very close to their grandmother and resentful of their parents, irritated by their constant references to their American relatives’ wealth with Shinjiro directly asking them why they haven’t asked how Kane has been or bothered to say hello to her before showing off photos of the Hawaiin mansion owned by Suzujiro. Kane also sets them right after deciding she’d like to visit after all, explaining that she couldn’t care less or if he’s rich or not she’d just like to see her brother. Her refusal to accept him was perhaps an expression of her own inability to make peace with the past, having literally forgotten only latterly coming to believe that Suzujiro really is her brother and wanting to reintegrate him into her life as an expression of peace between nations. 

Kane had said that Tadao’s conviction that they should avoid mentioning the bomb was illogical and ridiculous, an attitude later borne out by the unexpected arrival of Suzujiro’s half-American son Clark (Richard Gere) who speaks pigeon Japanese and is somewhat mortified by his own ignorance not having realised that his uncle must have died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki until inadvertently tipped off by eldest grandson Tateo’s (Hidetaka Yoshioka) telegram. Clark bonds with Kane and sadly reflects on his own lack of knowledge after visiting the school where his uncle died and seeing scores of contemporary children flood into the playground where the twisted metal of a melted climbing frame serves as a memorial for the young lives that were lost. The intention is not however to provoke an apology or apportion blame only to mourn the folly of war while trying to put the past aside to ensure it never happens again.

The kids wear jeans and T-shirts with the logos of American universities on, but are determined to fix the out of tune harmonium in their grandmother’s parlour as if literarily setting the past to rights. The song they play sings of a red rose in a field, a rose that Shinjiro later sees near the shrine during the memorial service for the bombing that comes to resemble Kane in the closing frames as she charges through the rain with her blown umbrella while her children and grandchildren chase after her as the ants had trailed the rose. “People will do anything just to win a war,” Kane admonishes her son, “sooner or later it will be the ruin of us all” reminding him that dropping the bomb didn’t stop people killing each other, even 45 years later war continues to ruin people’s lives. Like the rose “blossoming in innocence” she stands for peace and mutual compassion amid an expressionist storm of fear and resentment.

Rhapsody in August screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 19th & 25th February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Legend of Gatotkaca (Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca, Hanung Bramantyo, 2022)

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Indonesia has quietly been building its very own superhero cinematic universes over the past few years with Joko Anwar’s Gundala almost certainly the best known internationally. The Legend of Gatotkaca (Satria Dewa: Gatotkaca) is similarly intended to be the first in a new franchise, Satria Dewa, which draws influence from Indian mythology and is set in a dualistic world centuries after a battle between good and evil was ended by the gods to stop evil winning. 

Essentially an origin story for the titular hero Gatotkaca, the film follows down on his luck photographer Yuda (Rizky Nazar) who had to drop out of university because he is poor and also responsible for taking care of his mother who is suffering with memory loss and mental illness following an incident 15 years previously in which the pair were attacked by a mysterious figure in black who could shoot lasers from his fingers. Yuda assumes his memories from back then must have been a dream and that his mother’s mental distress has more to do with his father, Pande (Cecep Arif Rahman), abandoning the family. Nevertheless, he is soon dragged into intrigue when his best friend Erlangga (Jerome Kurnia) is murdered in the same way his mother was attacked during his university graduation ceremony. Determined to figure out the truth, Yuda and professor’s daughter Agni (Yasmin Napper) find their way to a secret organisation Erlangga had been a part of which aims to save the world from destructive forces carrying the Kaurava gene. 

In the film’s dualistic world view, there was once a civil war between those carrying the Pandava gene which encourages good, humanistic qualities and the Kaurava whose impulses are dark and destructive. But then as Professor Arya (Edward Akbar) who studies such things points out, Pandava can also be destructive while Kaurava are capable of using their “destructive” qualities for good. Even so, most of the bad things that have happened in the world particularly in the last 15 years since a mysterious meteorite fell to earth, can be attributed to the rising Kaurava influence from political corruption to illegal logging and even the COVID-19 pandemic. Someone is bumping off Pandava in an effort to release evil Kaurava general Aswatama (Fedi Nuril) from his imprisonment within a giant gemstone which explains the “mysterious” deaths of talented people like Olympic sportmsmen and a doctor who discovered a COVID-19 vaccine. 

Of course, Yuda turns out to be a chosen one and must pursue his destiny as the defender of the Pandava before assuming his rightful role as Gatotkaca. Only by confronting his immediate family history can he make himself whole and gain the strength to defeat Aswatama, saving the world from chaos. Meanwhile he has to contend with a romantic subplot in which Agni is aggressively courted by the odious and entitled Nathan (Axel Matthew Thomas) and his father who have at least strong Kaurava energy aside from being embodiments of oppressive elitism looking down on Yuda simply because he is poor. The underground cell Yuda eventually comes into contact with are also in their way a resistance to this same elitism, though unusually well equipped in their incredibly expensive-looking lair filled with the latest technology and looked after by a kindly Indian granny who is herself a Karauna but uses her powers, and at one point a good old-fashioned shot gun, for good.

It’s this duality to which the film eventually returns as Yuda declares they must be the light in the darkness and the darkness in the light as they secretly wage a war against an ancient evil apparently already well established in the contemporary social order. This being the first instalment in what seems to be cued up as a burgeoning franchise, there is undoubtedly a lot to take in from the talk of heirlooms and amulets to holy water and ancient weapons though the film does boast some excellent production design even if the centralisation of genetics as an indicator of good and evil is equally uncomfortable. Nevertheless, it’s a promising start to the cycle with a series of exciting action set pieces showcasing the art of silat along with some impressive CGI in the Star Wars-esque laser warfare even if it’s clear Gatotkaca’s toughest battles are yet to come.

Legend of Gatotkaca streams in the US via Hi-YAH! from 17th February and will be released on Digital, blu-ray, and DVD on March 21 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Sanjuro (椿三十郎, Akira Kurosawa, 1962)

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Adapted from a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo had taken place in a world of collapse in which the foundations of the feudal order had begun to crack while the disruptive allure of hard currency had left ordinary people at the mercy of gang intimidation in place of exploitative lords. A quasi-sequel or perhaps more accurately termed a companion piece, Sanjuro (椿三十郎, Tsubaki Sanjuro) by contrast, takes place in a world that should be peaceful and orderly but suggests that the corruption was there all along and tolerated to the extent of being coded into the system. 

The accused man, Mutsuta (Yunosuke Ito), says as much at the film’s conclusion explaining that he meant to deal with the matter “more discreetly” after amassing incontrovertible evidence he could he could offer to his superiors in the capital if only his hot-headed nephew and the idealistic young samurai with him hadn’t jumped the gun by naively thinking they could expose conspiracy by force of will. This time around, the wandering ronin who gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) finds himself adopting a fatherly position trying to convince the youngsters to think before they act. Overhearing their conversation, he explains to them that they have mostly likely been misled, Mutsuta is innocent and his attempt to warn them off well-meaning while the superintendent Kikui (Masao Shimizu) is the real villain and almost certainly intends to have the lot of them bumped off before they figure out what’s really going on. 

Unlike Yojimbo, Sanjuro takes place entirely within samurai society which ought to be an orderly place where everyone follows the same code and does their best to act honourably. This sense of stability is reflected in Kurosawa’s composition which leans closer to the classicism of the historical drama than the windswept vistas of the lonely ghost town in Yojimbo, and by the contrast so often drawn between the wandering ronin and the young samurai who are shocked by his rough way of speaking and wilful rejection of the politeness with which they have been raised. As a captured prisoner points out, Sanjuro has a sarcastic manner and a tendency to insult where he means to praise which further fuels the doubt some have in him, unsure whether they can really trust this “outspoken and eccentric” drifter fearing he will simply sell himself to the highest bidder and betray them. Mutsuta sympathises with this to some degree, forgiving the boys for having thought him a villain but lamenting that his long face has often got him into trouble. They thought he was the bad guy because he looked like one and trusted Kikui because he looked honest, laying bare the childish superficiality soon corrected by the well honed instincts of the veteran Sanjuro. 

It’s this superficiality that also leads them to dismiss the advice of Lady Mutsuta (Takako Irie) as “hopelessly naive” while only Sanjuro can see that she has a full grasp of the situation at hand and accepts her admonishment that he has the “bad habit” of killing too easily when another solution may be available. When the boys catch one of Kikui’s henchmen they suggest killing him because he’s seen their faces, but Lady Mutsuta decides to invite him into their home, assuring him he won’t be harmed and even giving him one of their fancy kimonos to wear. The man seems to have been won over by their hospitality, sometimes emerging from the cupboard where he is (voluntarily) imprisoned to offer a word of advice along with a defence of Sanjuro having observed him and figured out that he is a good man with an admittedly gruff manner that makes him a bad fit for conventional samurai society. “He would find it too confining here,” Mutsuta agrees, “he wouldn’t wear these fine garments or be a docile servant of the clan.”

In any case, the film doesn’t particularly reject samurai society only suggest that if you’re going to live within it you should follow the rules and if you can’t you should follow your own path as Sanjuro has been doing in a sense “freed” by his ronin status serving no master but himself. Lady Mutsuta had a point when she said that he glistened like a drawn sword, something he too concedes after facing off against his final foe, Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), whom he describes as much like himself another drawn sword in a society in which direct violence is inappropriate as the explosive spray of blood on Heibei’s all too matter of fact defeat makes plain. “The sword is best kept in its sheath” she reminds him, she and her husband both suggesting that this world is ruled by intrigue which is why Mutsuta hoped to handle the corruption “discreetly” though he won’t condemn the young men for their desire to enforce the rules of their society and stand up against corruption and injustice. Their rebellion has accidentally led to unnecessary deaths because of their youthful hot-headedness and tendency towards the simplistic solution of violence, but all things considered it has worked out well enough for all concerned. And so, his work done, Sanjuro is left to wander telling the boys not to follow him because he too is a disruptive and dangerous a presence in this codified world of peace and order in which a sword loses its value the moment it is drawn.

Sanjuro screened at the BFI Southbank, London as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Kinema Junpo Announces 96th Best 10 (2022)

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Prestigious cinema magazine Kinema Junpo has released its always anticipated “Best 10” list for films released in 2022, the 96th edition. Small, Slow But Steady takes the top spot plus Actress and Supporting Actor while there’s also a strong showing for pandemic-era social drama No Place to Go which picks up Best Director and Screenplay.

Best 10

1. Small, Slow But Steady (ケイコ 目を澄ませて, Sho Miyake)

Yukino Kishii stars as a young deaf woman and aspiring boxer who is slowly losing the will to fight amid the constant strain of life in a largely unaccommodating society. Shot in grainy 16mm, the latest from Sho Miyake (And Your Bird Can Sing) is equal parts boxing movie and character study in which its scrappy heroine gradually regains her momentum.

2. A Man (ある男, Kei Ishikawa)

©2022 "A MAN" FILM PARTNERS

The latest film from Kei Ishikawa (Gukoroku: Traces of Sin, Arc), A Man stars Satoshi Tsumabuki as a lawyer who is pulled into a web of intrigue when a former client asks him to investigate her late husband who had been living under an assumed identity.

3. No Place to Go (夜明けまでバス停で, Banmei Takahashi)

Social drama from Banmei Takahashi (Rain of Light) exploring the effects of the pandemic on the homeless community through the story of a 45-year-old woman who loses her home and job when the yakitori restaurant she was working in is forced to close.

4. Amiko (こちらあみ子, Yusuke Morii)

Quirky drama loosely inspired by Natsuko Imamura’s novel Atarashii Musume following an eccentric young girl in the wake of a traumatic event in her family.

5. A Winter Rose (冬薔薇, Junji Sakamoto)

Social drama from Junji Sakamoto focussing on an aimless young man, Jun (Kentaro Ito), whose parents (Kaoru Kobayashi & Kimiko Yo) run a shipping business. Jun does not work or pursue education and spends his time hanging out with other young people of a similar outlook until one of his friends is attacked.

6. The Zen Diary (土を喰らう十二ヵ月, Yuji Nakae)

Contemplative foodie drama starring Kenji Sawada as a man living a self-sufficient life in the mountains while struggling to move on from the loss of his wife several years previously.

6. Anime Supremacy! (ハケンアニメ, Kohei Yoshino)

Broad comedy inspired by the CLAMP manga in which a young woman who has been patiently working towards her directorial debut in the anime industry enters a rivalry with the director who once inspired her and is returning to the director’s chair for the first time in eight years.

6. Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa)

Powerful dystopian drama expanded from Hayakawa’s short in the 10 Years Japan anthology. Chieko Baisho stars as an elderly woman increasingly excluded from mainstream society who is pushed towards a voluntary euthanasia programme for the over 75s.

9. Missing (さがす, Shinzo Katayama)

Eerie mystery thriller drawing inspiration from the true life “Twitter Killer” case in which a young girl becomes concerned for her father when he disappears shortly after claiming to have spotted a fugitive serial killer in the local area.

9. Thousand and One Nights (千夜、一夜, Nao Kubota)

Plaintive drama in which two women are left with a series of unanswered questions following the disappearances of their husbands. While the older continues to wait in patient desperation 30 years later, the younger seeks permission to move on though neither of them know any peace.

Best 10 International

  • (c) 2021 Jeonwonsa Film Co. All Rights Reserved
  1. Licorice Pizza 
  2. Top Gun: Maverick 
  3. Parallel Mothers
  4. Cry Macho
  5. Annette
  6. Coda
  7. Belfast
  8. West Side Story
  9. Beanpole
  10. In Front of Your Face

Best 10 Documentaries

1. Watashi no Hanashi Buraku no Hanashi (私のはなし 部落のはなし, Yusaku Mitsuwaka)

2. Kagawa District 1 (香川1区, Arata Oshima)

3. Tamaneko, Tamabito (たまねこ、たまびと, Hiroyasu Murakami)

4. Education and Nationalism (教育と愛国, Hisayo Saika)

5. Soup and Ideology (スープとイデオロギー, Yang Yonghi)

6. Patriotic Confessions: Breaking the Silence Part2 (愛国の告白—沈黙を破るPart2—, Toshikuni Doi)

7. Ushiku (牛久, Thomas Ash)

8. Yakeato Chronicle (焼け跡クロニクル, Masato Hara)

9. Long Time Passing (失われた時の中で, Masako Sakata)

9. Kita no Tomoshibi: Neuengamme Kyosei Shuyojo to Bullenhuser Damm no Kodomotachi (北のともしび −ノイエンガンメ強制収容所とブレンフーザー・ダムの子どもたち−, Shizu Azuma)

Individual Awards

Best Director: Banmei Takahashi (No Place to Go)

Best Screenplay: Aki Kajiwara (No Place to Go)

Best Director (international): Pedro Almodóvar (Parallel Mothers)

Best Actress: Yukino Kishii (Small, Slow But Steady; God Wants Payback; Inu mo Kuwane do Charlie wa Warau; One Day, You Will Reach the Sea)

Best Actor: Kenji Sawada (The Zen Diary)

Best Supporting Actress: Ryoko Hirosue (2 Women, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Sherlock the Movie, The Confidence Man JP -Episode of the Hero)

Best Supporting Actor: Tomokazu Miura (Small, Slow But Steady; Sen wa, Boku wo Egaku; Goodbye, Cruel World)

Best Newcomer (actress): Lina Kahafizadeh (My Small Land)

Best Newcomer (actor): Ren Meguro (Phases of the Moon, Osomatsu-san)

Readers’ Choice Best Director: Sho Miyake (Small, Slow But Steady)

Readers’ Choice Best Director (international): Sian Heder (Coda)

Readers’ Choice Award: Saburo Kawamoto (Eiga wo Mireba Wakaru Koto)

Special Award: Nobuhiko Kobayashi (novelist and film writer)

Source: Kinema Junpo official website.

Yojimbo (用心棒, Akira Kurosawa, 1961)

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“You’re not a bad guy after all” a previously hostile inn owner later concedes, finally seeing the method in the madness of a cynical wanderer who appears to take no side but his own but may in his own way be quietly fighting for justice in a lawless place. A samurai western set in an eerie ghost town beset by feuding gangsters whose presence has destroyed the local economy and lives of the frightened townspeople, Yojimbo (用心棒) subversively suggests that the world’s absurdity is best met with nihilistic amusement and healthy dose of irony. 

When the confused hero who later gives his name as Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune) wanders into town, he is surprised to see a stray dog running past him with a human hand in its mouth. This is indeed a dog-eat-dog society in which a petty dispute between gang members has forced the townspeople to hide behind closed doors. The streets are empty and silent until the town’s only policeman darts out and requests a “commission” for recommending Sanjuro offer his services as a bodyguard to either of the two factions suggesting that brothel owner Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) is on the way out and upstart Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka) is the best bet. But Sanjuro does not particularly like the look of Ushitora’s gang which as is later revealed is largely staffed by desperate disreputables, convicts, and murderers. 

Sanjuro’s response is to laugh. He makes his money by killing and there are lots of people in this town the world would be better off without. He plays each side off against the other, knowing that they each need a man of his skill to break the stalemate but is rightfully mistrustful of both. First approaching Seibei, he overhears his cynical wife Orin (Isuzu Yamada) suggesting that they agree to his high fee but kill him afterwards so his services will effectively be free. Sanjuro’s plan is to antagonise both sides so they wipe each other out, freeing the town of their destructive influence. With violence so present on the streets, the townspeople are afraid to leave their homes and the only guy making any money is the undertaker. 

The trouble also means they can’t host the local silk fair which usually stimulates the town’s economy demonstrating the counter-productivity of the gangsters’ dispute in that no silk fair means no delegates and empty gambling rooms meaning the gangsters aren’t making any money either. Yet it’s also clear that it’s gambling that has corrupted the town and is disrupting the social order. A symptom of an economical shift, gambling offers a new path to social mobility amid the fiercely hierarchal feudal society in which the possibility of distinguishing oneself in warfare has also disappeared. Thus the young man Sanjuro encounters on the way into town argues with his father, rejecting the “long life of eating gruel” of a peasant farmer claiming he wants nice clothes and good food and has chosen to burn out brightly. Kohei (Yoshio Tsuchiya), a young father has also succumbed to the false hope offered by the gambling halls and lost everything, including his wife, to a greedy sake brewer turned silk merchant and local mayor thanks to his enthusiastic backing of Ushitora. 

“I hate guys like that” Sanjuro snarls, but it seems he also hates petty gangsters and everything they represent. “This town will be quiet now” he remarks before leaving, as if stating that his work here is done and the real purpose of it was clearing out the source of the corruption rather than taking advantage of the town’s plight for his own material gain. Yojimbo quite literally means bodyguard and is the service Sanjuro offers to each side interchangeably, but Sanjuro isn’t above betraying his clients or playing one off against the other. His final foe, Ushitora’s brooding brother Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai), wanders around with a pistol in his kimono as if to say the age of wandering swordsmen has come to an end but in the end is exposed as complacent in his superior technology, easily neutered by Sanjuro who even gives the gun back to him as if no longer caring whether he lives or dies merely amused to find out the answer much as he had been standing on a bell tower watching the factions pointlessly tussling below. Masaru Sato’s surprisingly cheerful score seems to echo his state of mind, seeing only humour in the absurdities of the feudal order and the futility of violence while Kurosawa’s camera roves around this windswept wasteland as Sajuro kicks the gates of hell shut and prepares to move on to the next crisis in a seemingly lawless society.

Yojimbo screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 18th & 23rd February 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Goodbye Cruel World (グッバイ・クルエル・ワールド, Tatsushi Omori, 2022)

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Tatsushi Omori has had a rather strange career beginning with the incredibly grim Whispering of the Gods which was so controversial that the only way he could screen it was to set up a marquee in a park and put it on himself. Since then he has in recent years softened a bit with the incredibly charming Seto and Utsumi and heartwarming tea ceremony drama Every Day a Good Day. Goodbye Cruel World (グッバイ・クルエル・ワールド) returns to the nihilism of Omori’s earliest work, but with a layer of heavy irony in its self-consciously cool aesthetics. 

This is world is cruel indeed, pulling each of the worldweary protagonists into an inescapable hell of crime and violence. As the film opens, a car of full of criminals drives towards a love hotel where they plan to rob a bunch of yakuza in the middle of a money laundering exchange. If you have to rob someone, perhaps it’s fair enough to rob the yakuza but for obvious reasons it’s not a very good idea. Still, the fact is they accomplish the heist pretty easily not least because the yakuza are lazy and complacent. Not only could they not be bothered to change their meeting place like the boss told them, the lookouts didn’t even put up much of a fight. “Japan’s gone to hell,” “old-leftist gone bad” Hamada (Tomokazu Miura) sighs lamenting that no one does their job properly anymore.

Now in his 70s, Hamada waxes on his days as a student protestor while now a disillusioned old man who was previously dismissed from his position as a political secretary for cooking the books. In a last ditch bid to change the status quo, he later hatches on a plan to rob the secret campaign stashes of the incumbent conservative candidate whom he has also exposed for tax evasion and an affair with a bar hostess not to mention a general air of sleaze and corruption. The robbers’ main competition is a corrupt policeman who’s been working with the yakuza ever since he was foolish enough to accept a tip off from boss Ogata (Shingo Tsurumi) to arrest some of his rivals. 

Like everyone else, what Detective Hachiya (Nao Omori) wants is out but there is no out from this hellish world of crime. Anzai (Hidetoshi Nishijima) tried to go straight in the wake of anti-organised crime legislation but there are no second chances for ex-yakuza. He just wanted a normal life, but it’s hard to leave the yakuza world behind when you can’t even open a bank account and no wants to employ a former thug. Hachiya steals the money to buy himself a new life trying to resurrect his father-in-law’s failed hotel in a moribund seaside town where the other businessmen lament the decline of the local shopping area amid the economic complexities of the contemporary society. But he’s frustrated by the arrival of former associates, Iijima (Eita Okuno), who blackmails him over his yakuza past and poignantly says he’s done for the same reasons Anzai does the robbery, he just wants to be able to live together with his wife and child. 

Miru (Tina Tamashiro) says she came up with the idea of robbing the yakuza to escape sex work and is helped by hotel employee Yano (Hio Miyazawa) who dreams of running away with her. She says all she wants is sleep, while he wants to live comfortably in a quiet seaside town. Like the kids that hang round Hamada, they represent a kind of rebellious youth rejecting the corrupt authority of men like Anzai and Hachiya but are quickly slapped down. As Hachiya points out, the “grown-ups” took all the money and the only reason they’re not dead is that Ogata wants them to clean up their mess before they go by taking out the other gang members. During the robbery, Miru appears an unwilling participant so frightened that she cannot pry her fingers from the pistol when the sociopathic Hagiwara demands it back. But on her eventual murder spree/mission of revenge she’s an ice cold killer with vacant eyes trying to shoot her way out of existential malaise. 

Omori signals the degree to which they are all trapped by the ubiquity of retro nostalgia in the unlikely ‘70s getaway car and the soul music which plays on its sound system. Seeming to directly reference ‘90s Tarantino in musical choices, the film’s self-consciously cool aesthetic sometimes works against it even while hinting at the general sense of emptiness which envelops those caught in this hellish underworld. As Anzai later suggests, they are all the same, covered in blood with nowhere to go for there is no place for any of them in contemporary Japan. A bloody tale of nihilistic futility and self-destructive violence, Goodbye Cruel World suggests that there’s no way back from the purgatorial exile of an underworld existence.

Goodbye Cruel World screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Project Wolf Hunting (늑대사냥, Kim Hong-sun, 2022)

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“Remember, there’s nowhere to run” an arrogant police officer explains to collection of rapists and murderers locked aboard a cargo ship ready to be delivered to “justice” in Korea having attempted to flee to the Philippines. It is in someways ironic that these men and women, depraved as many of them may be, have been loaded onto a commercial vessel to be shipped home less like cattle than faceless and inanimate objects. Kim Hong-sun’s eerie gore fest Project Wolf Hunting (늑대사냥, Neukdaesanyang) is in many ways about the horrors of the past but also suggests that the present is little better in a world in which there is little difference between cop and thug and we are all at the mercy of looming violence. 

As one older prisoner puts it, “if this isn’t hell, I don’t know what is”. Thanks to an international extradition arrangement some of the worst Korean criminals are about to be repatriated from the Philippines only the historic event is disrupted by a suicide bombing carried out by a disgruntled victim whose smashed glasses and severed limbs are an eerie harbinger of what’s to come. After a rethink, the government decides to hire a cargo boat instead so the public won’t have access to the criminals, which is somewhat ironic, while accompanied by a crack team of veteran cops each with over 10 years of experience on the force. Already it isn’t seeming like a very well thought through plan, but as Captain Lee (Park Ho-San), who openly beats a prisoner with whom he has prior history on the dock, points out, there aren’t any cameras so he has full authority to enforce the law with no concern for the rights of inmates nor basic human morality. To cut it short, he’s little different than they are even if he isn’t, as far as we know, a multiple murderer or rapist. 

In any case, keeping a bunch of violent criminals handcuffed with only one bathroom break a day and no stimulation seems like a recipe for disaster even if it weren’t just plain inhumane. But inevitably the operation is compromised by an attempt to spring a gang boss which lets the criminals take control of the ship albeit temporarily seeing as there’s something else lurking in the bowels of this floating hellscape that is pure nightmare fuel and a not quite living embodiment of man’s inhumanity to man. Predictably, this all stems back to the abuses of the colonial era and the machinations of the equivalent of Unit 731 operating in the Philippines but has since seemingly been co-opted by a shady Korean organisation apparently also attracted to the research’s capitalistic potential in the booming anti-ageing market hoping to usher in the next stage of human evolution. 

What ensues is a parade of senseless violence in which cop and killer alike are stalked by a mysterious “monster” with wolf-like senses and preternatural strength, and that’s on top of the bloody destruction wrought by the vengeful criminals in their unsuccessful attempt to escape. As Lee had said, there really is nowhere to run though as it turns out that cuts both ways. The gang boss proves unexpectedly heroic, genuinely trying to save the moll who’d been arrested alongside him, while law enforcement reveals itself hopelessly out of depth even as Lee and his female subordinate Da-yeon (Jung So-min) pivot towards protecting the prisoners they were previously intent on oppressing as they form a temporary alliance to defend themselves against the mysterious threat, ironically a product of the “kemono” (beast) project and a reminder of what happens when you decide that some people aren’t really “human” after all. 

Even so, the rampage is indiscriminate. The “monster” doesn’t care if you’re a cop or a killer, all it knows is violence smashing in the heads of the toughest gangsters and ripping hearts out of well-built bodies without a second thought. It’s got no eyes but knows how to use a gun and it still might not be the scariest thing on the boat, at least not in the end as we wonder what exactly all this is for and what might be meant by the next evolution of our species. This is indeed hell and there’s no where to run either from the unresolved past or the malignant future. 

Project Wolf Hunting is released in the US on Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD on Feb. 14 courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Thousand and One Nights (千夜、一夜, Nao Kubota, 2022)

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“I can reach the mainland by rowing boat, but why won’t my feelings reach you?” a plaintive song asks in Nao Kubota’s melancholy tale of perpetual longing and continual loss, Thousand and One Nights (千夜、一夜, Senya, Ichiya). A lingering ghost story, Kubota’s contemplative mood piece sees two women, one old and one young, take different paths in the wake of their abandonment but perhaps finding themselves no less unhappy when left with the unanswered questions of a sudden absence. 

On the island of Sado, fishwife Tomiko (Yuko Tanaka) has been waiting for her fisherman husband Satoshi to return home ever since he said he was “just going out for a bit” thirty years previously. Many in the community view her with a mixture of pity of revulsion, seeing her as close to madness in her refusal to accept that her husband will never come back to her. Meanwhile, the former mayor Taisuke now retired to take care of his bedridden wife, puts another young woman, Nami (Machiko Ono), whose husband Yoji (Masanobu Ando) similarly just went out for a bit two years ago and never came back, in touch with Tomiko hoping she can help her investigate what might have happened and if Yoji may be among the small number of presumed abductees taken from the island by the North Koreans. 

Sado does seem to have a large numbers of “missing” people, which in itself is not such an unusual phenomenon given how easy it can be in Japan to simply “evaporate” and start again somewhere else. The island was also the site of a handful of confirmed abductions by North Korea in the late 1970s, dangling another unanswered question in front of the women wondering if their husbands might have been spirited away and prevented from contacting them no matter how much they may have wanted to. Nami is herself third generation Zainichi Korean and wonders if that might have had something to do with Yoji’s disappearance, though in contrast to Tomiko her goal is less reunion than a simple desire to know why. She wants to give herself permission to move on, having drifted into a relationship with a besotted colleague (Takashi Yamanaka) she may not actually quite love but offers her a quiet and conventional life of security she’ll never now know with Yoji. 

Nami does, however, feel a degree of shame in her desire to put the past behind her as if she were betraying a romantic ideal in being unable or unwilling to give up her life in waiting as Tomiko has done. She fears Tomiko may resent her, but she doesn’t, not really only acknowledging that she’s made a different choice. Like Tomiko, Nami is left with unanswerable questions, wondering if Yoji simply walked out on her because he grew tired of the inevitability of their life together, if he was bored, or lonely or depressed. Perhaps he met someone else, had an accident and lost his memory, fell off a cliff or was killed in some other way and someone covered it up. Perhaps he’s dead, perhaps he’s in North Korea. Perhaps it’s all the same. 

While the community pities Tomiko in her martyrdom, they attempt to pressure her to move on by agreeing to marry local fisherman Haruo (Dankan) who has long carried a torch for her even since they were children. Yet in the irrationality of romantic longing, Haruo cannot understand why Tomiko will not give up on Satoshi even as he is unable to give up on her despite her frequent and unambiguous rejections of his overtures. There is a particularly unpleasant quality to his obsessive ardour as his mother (Kayoko Shiraishi) comes round to plead with Tomiko to marry her son and his work colleagues organise a kind of intervention asking her to give in because he’s going out of his mind. He runs her down, says she’s “withering away” and only he can save her while worryingly possessive and controlling even threatening suicide and later going missing at sea just to make her feel guilty and worry about him. 

Even Tomiko’s mother is suffering the pain of lost love, hugging her late husband’s prosthetic leg as she sleeps while excusing the drunken violence that Tomiko says left her with a lasting fear of men by explaining that the war changed him. Tomiko complains that no one ever tells her anything important and that they always leave, but equally refuses to reveal very much important to anyone else keeping her feelings largely to herself remaining something of an enigma, uncertain if her constant waiting is more habit than devotion. In all these tales of frustrated longing from Taisuke and his ailing wife to Satoshi’s parents who rarely talked of their son only for the father to tell the mother on her deathbed that he was still out playing, there is an inescapable loneliness in the essential inability of conveying one’s true feelings that leads some to simply make their exit without saying a word. 

Thousand and One Nights screens at New York’s IFC Center on Feb. 12 & 15 as part of ACA Cinema Project’s New Films From Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Zen Diary (土を喰らう十二ヵ月, Yuji Nakae, 2022)

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A romanticised idea of returning to the land has become a frequent motif in recent independent Japanese cinema as disillusioned youngsters crave freedom in simplicity but there’s no use denying the life of a mountain ascetic is not for everyone. Based on a 1978 essay by Tsutomu Mizukami, The Zen Diary (土を喰らう十二ヵ月, Tsuchi wo Kurau Junigatsu) is part foodie feature comfort film in the vein of The Little Forest and part melancholy contemplation on the cycle of life along with its inevitable end. 

Ageing widower Tsutomu (Kenji Sawada) lives in a cabin in the mountains with his beloved dog and is mostly self-sufficient, growing his fruit and vegetables for the largely vegetarian temple food he learned to cook as a novice monk. His peaceful days are sometimes interrupted by the arrival of his editor, Machiko (Takako Matsu ), in search of his latest manuscript but otherwise intent on staying for meal made with the freshest produce lovingly prepared by Tsutomu. It’s clear that their relationship is no longer strictly professional, if otherwise ill-defined, but equally that Tsutomu’s mountain life could itself be seen as a kind of limbo in his inability to move on from the death of his wife 13 years previously. Her ashes still sit in a box on his altar long after most would have them interred much to his elderly mother-in-law Chie’s (Tomoko Naraoka) consternation. 

Chie is also a mountain ascetic living in a cabin not far from Tsutomu’s where she apparently supplies half the local area with home made miso paste. This life is hard enough for Tsutomu, but must be verging on the impossible for a woman of Chie’s age. Nevertheless, she perseveres while apparently estranged from her surviving son (Toshinori Omi) with whose wife she did not apparently get along. Because of this apparent disconnect, Tsutomu is for some reason held responsible for her existence despite not being a blood relative, while her son is confused by her lifestyle and more or less refuses to have anything to do with her. 

Still, like Tsutomu she had perhaps also come to understand that life is movement and the simple routine of tending crops and preparing sustenance is the engine that drives existence. Divided into a series of vignettes following the traditional divisions of the year, the film lingers on seasonal details as Tsutomu painstakingly washes and prepares his homegrown veg and pickles to prepare for the upcoming season. A series of brushes with death, however, throw him into a contemplative mood realising that his ascetic lifestyle is also a flight from the inevitable and a refusal to face his fear of mortality. “Who in this world lives for eternity?” a folk song asks, while Tsutomu meditates on the zen teachings of his Buddhist upbringing and his life as a novice monk raised in a temple from the age of nine until he ran away at 13.

His reflections are perhaps more in keeping with the 1978 of the original essay than they are the contemporary setting of the film but also hint at the absurdity of class inequality. The crematorium has two doors, only one of them ornate, yet everyone leaves the same way and we are all equal in the end. He was sent to the temple because his family were too poor to feed him, though his temple life stood him in good stead for self-sufficiency and gave him the capacity for solitude. Though his family had lived on the edges of a graveyard, his father made coffins for a living, and temple life is necessarily bound up with death, Tsutomu had lived in its shadow never making his peace with mortality. Yet the seasons will also progress towards winter, and Tsutomu with them as his life draws towards its inevitable conclusion.

In any case, the film’s final words are those of thankfulness for all that life has to offer as represented in the fruits of the earth, gratefully received by an enlightened Tsutomu. In keeping with its subject matter, the unfussy yet often picturesque photography brings out the pleasures of a life of simplicity and the human warmth often to be found within it while also reflecting the intense melancholy of Tsutomu’s contemplative solitude as he meditates not only on mortality but what it is to live in sync with the rhythms of the natural world.

The Zen Diary screens at New York’s IFC Center on Feb. 12 & 16 as part of ACA Cinema Project’s New Films From Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)