Tag: 1980s

It’s All Right, My Friend (だいじょうぶマイフレンド, Ryu Murakami, 1983)

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Ryu Murakami was already a prize-winning author who had successfully adapted his own novel for the screen when he began work on 1983’s It’s All Right, My Friend (だいじょうぶマイフレンド, Daijobu My Friend) yet he was perhaps an odd choice for the material. A big budget blockbuster produced by Toho, the film may have been intended to echo the kind of films Kadokawa was making with its teenage starlets and media mix strategy and like them is largely built around the title song performed by star Leona Hirota. But what might have worked as a countercultural piece of punk cinema if made on a shoestring by starving artists could not help but fail when blessed with the production values of a mainstream picture. 

A case in point, the film stars Hollywood actor Peter Fonda as an alien, Gonzy, who has lost the ability to fly causing him to plummet into an outdoor swimming pool where the three heroes are hanging out. Fonda delivers all his lines in English, while everyone else replies in Japanese. Gonzy explains that he was raised in the US by a kindhearted scientist who taught him to speak (his first words were “Merry Christmas”) but longs to visit his home planet. Meanwhile, he’s being hunted by a mysterious fascistic group of misogynistic eugenicists who want his genes for their cloning programme which hopes to eliminate the need for human women to exist at all. 

Doors have apparently already taken over factories, family restaurants, and psychiatric institutions such as the Tachibana Mental Hospital where they take heroes Monica (Yoshiyuki Noo) and Mimimi (Leona Hirota) and try to brainwash them to recognise a pigeon as an apple and aeroplane as a banana. They also drill into the brain of a young man they describe as a poor delinquent in order to turn him into an obedient drone, the implication being that they wish to turn mankind into a race of automatons and possibly resent women because they pose a threat to their plan. Then again, there is a distantly homoerotic quality to the relationships between the Doors, two of them later dying with clasped hands aside from all their strange musical numbers about how women are inferior and produce only substandard offspring.  

Ryuichi Sakamoto is credited as a composer on the film and the Doors’ henchman appear to be closely styled to resemble Yellow Magic Orchestra, often mimicking their dance moves while otherwise faceless and anonymous behind their identical sunglasses and slicked back hair. Murakami signals his intentions in the opening scene in which Mimimi has a dream sequence in the manner of classic Hollywood musical. She dances with an American sailor against a backdrop that strongly recalls the noir cinema of the late 40s until a car full of gangsters turns up and shoots him with a machine gun leaving her kicking around on her own. Music becomes the device that can break through the Doors’ programming, the drones beginning to twitch to Monica’s Harmonica provoking a vision of dancers in gold lamé that finally ends in a mass disco of liberation from the authoritarian thought police that restores Gonzy’s ability to fly. 

Even so, the reason he couldn’t was apparently his aversion to his personal kryptonite, tomatoes, whose voices he can hear whispering that they hate him and thereby suppressing his powers in reawakening memories of his childhood trauma along with his low self-esteem. To help him fly again, the gang engage in a series of crazy episodes including hang gliding in Saipan while Gonzy continues as an innocent with an incredibly vulgar sensibility eventually turning his “bazooka-like” ejaculate into a key weapon. There might be something in the echoing of an early ’80s anxiety about dangerous technology and weird techno-cults with shady motivations for their scientific endeavours though the irony is often buried under the swanky blockbuster production values and destabilising presence of Fonda who is quite literally in a different film from the rest of the cast by virtue of speaking his own language and being unable to understand what is going on. Even so, the film like the title song is essentially a kind of tribute to intercultural friendship in the bond that arises between the trio of aimless youths and the middle-aged space alien who’s trying to find his way home. Decidedly strange and defiantly surreal, Murakami’s weird countercultural blockbuster is a forgotten piece of 80s pulp but perhaps exposes something of the anxieties of a Japan heading towards the height of its prosperity and developing a fear of flying if not quite of tomatoes.

Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1983)

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Produced as a special marking the 100th episode of the Tuesday Night Suspense Theatre TV drama series, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Legend of the Cat Monster (麗猫伝説, Reibyo densetsu) is preceded by a title card reading “Elegy for a Faraway Film”. Scripted by Chiho Katsura, the film is indeed in its way a lament for dying world albeit one which owes a heavy debt to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard with a little Fedora thrown in. Repurposing the classic ghost cat film it casts cinema itself as dangerous illusion, a vampiric compulsion that drowns all who encounter it in irresolvable longing. 

This sense of irrecoverable nostalgia is palpable from the opening sequence which, aside from the melancholy voiceover, introduces us to the world of Setouchi Cinema apparently a moribund studio complex once dubbed the Hollywood of Japan. The new arrival, Ryohei (Akira Emoto), is dressed in noticeably anachronistic fashion as if he were a 1930s newsboy rather than a young man living in the Japan of the early 1980s. His girlfriend, Ryoko (Jun Fubuki), who works as a stage hand dresses in a similarly old-fashioned style and in fact carries an oversize watch that was a heirloom from her late father, an unsuccessful film director. Ryoko remarks that she’s been hoping someone would come and rescue her from this half-dead island but she doubts Ryohei will be the one to do it because he has also come here in search of a dream. 

That dream is, however, already dead at least according to some. The film director working at the studio is berated by a woman of around the same age working as a manager for an idol star for still getting an allowance from his mother at 60 because he has failed to make it as a film director at least in financial terms. There is a poignant, largely unexplored subplot between that suggests the inability to reconcile the dream of cinema with the economic “reality” has kept them apart all these years and that their dream of love may now be over too. 

It seems that the reclusive actress at the film’s centre, Akiko (Wakaba Irie), is also living on a frustrated dream of love withdrawing from the world around her believing that her lover will someday return from “Hollywood” which seems to be another word for paradise or perhaps the world beyond on the other side of the silver screen. To her, film is but a dream with in a dream. A window or screen is a portal to the burdens of the heart, memories of days gone by, and the illusions we once saw that cannot be seen again.  She herself is trapped within her own dream of love, but it is not so much a dream of her that bewitches Ryohei but the impossibility of cinema.

When passing photographer, Tachihara (Toru Minegishi), who lost his own wife to the unobtainable magic of the movies, snaps a picture of Akiko at her window holding a cat and looking exactly as she did the day she abruptly walked out on an incomplete film, it spurs a cynical producer to get the idea of convincing her to make a comeback and in a ghost cat movie, no less. Obayashi’s casting coup is getting mother and daughter Takako and Wakaba Irie to play aged and youthful versions of the famous actress, Takako herself having been a huge star of the 1930s performing most notably for Kenji Mizoguchi in the The Water Magician. There is an undeniable poignancy in her reflection that is only her aging body which is dying, as if she were merely becoming an embodiment of her image migrating to silver screen which exists between this world and next. It’s this screen that is later ruptured by Ryoko as she makes her escape after failing to save Ryohei from the curse of cinema. 

As Akiko laments, he’s writing his script more for himself than for her and it’s the quest for art which has begun to drain and make him mad. When he, pale and zombie-like, attempts to proffer his scripts it appears to be nothing more than his own name written over and over again. Like the Max-esque butler Mizumori (Akira Oizumi) says, film is an eternal dream which by its definition can never realised and exists only a state of longing somewhere beyond the veil. Drawing inspiration from Nobuo Nakagawa in particular and harnessing the sense of gothic dread found in Sunset Boulevard, Obayashi captures the eternal nightmares of artistic creation with the maddening obsessions of unrequited love and the image of the ideal which exists eternally out of reach somewhere on the other side of the screen.

Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Jang-ho, 1986)

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After finding huge success with his debut film, Lee Jang-ho soon became disillusioned with the film industry and was in fact temporarily banned after being found in possession of marijuana. After the assassination of Park Chung-hee in 1979, Lee returned with a new focus on socially conscious filmmaking only to be blindsided by the advent of an entirely new age of oppression following the coup of general Chun Doo-hwan in 1980. In contrast to Park’s regime, Chun’s embarked on a deliberate bread and circuses policy pushing sports, sex, and screen in which social commentary was out and softcore very much in. 

Lee had opened his nonsense film Declaration of an Idiot with a scene of himself committing suicide because no one cares about movies anymore, they only like sports which lends a note of irony to his incredibly strange and very of its time baseball film, Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Chang-houi wingudan). Adapted from a popular sports manhwa, the film is ostensibly a much more commercial affair yet in its way is attempting to subtly attack the growing inequalities of the Chun era as its poor mountain boy hero, Hye-seong (Choi Jae-sung), squares off against posh boy rival Dong-tak (Maeng Sang-hoon) not only for sporting glory but the hand of his innocent first love Um-ji (Lee Bo-hee). 

As Dong-tak joins a top-rated team and is interviewed on television, Hye-seong returns to the mountains to train and is trying to dodge the train fare while travelling with his father to discuss joining a team. He eventually strikes a blow against Dong-tak by striking him out during a perfect game, but ruins his shoulder in the process with his baseball dreams then behind him, which is a problem because he’s devoted his entire life to fulfilling the promise he made to Um-ji when they were children to become a great baseball player. Hye-song repeatedly promises to do anything he can to make Um-ji happy even if it means accepting her relationship with Dong-tak, but Dong-tak openly laughs at him for being a nobody though there is something worryingly intense in his suddenly throwing all his letters from Um-ji, which he had in his bag, on the table describing them as written by a “goddess” and his “sacred place.”

As for Um-ji herself, she seemingly has little control over her life as the daughter of an upperclass family. She began dating Dong-tak before reconnecting with Hye-seong in Seoul and originally sticks to her class-appropriate match before being tempted by her innocent childhood connection and realising Dong-tak is an arrogant arsehole who didn’t show up to her birthday dinner because he forgot and went on a date with another girl. Even so, her family continue to pressure her into marrying Dong-tak despite his manly decision to ignore her until he’s accomplished his mission of achieving 100 consecutive hits at which point he’ll propose. Hye-song ironically makes a similar decision, taking off for a training session on a remote island which ends up lasting a whole year during which his completely insane mentor Coach Byeon-ho (Ahn Sung-ki) denies him permission to write to her. When he returns, Um-ji has ended up married to Dong-tak and is in a depressive state wandering through life in a daze of guilt and disappointment that she betrayed both herself and Hye-seong because of social pressure to conform and is now stuck in this emotionally unsatisfying relationship. Hye-seong rejects her on the grounds that the spark has gone from her eyes and she’s no longer the Um-ji of his youth though also accepting some responsibility for that. At the end of the film, Hye-song loses his sight which allows him to reunite with a changed Um-ji who has separated from the now loser Dong-tak, no longer able to see the change in her remembering only the Um-ji he fell in love with. 

The men who were with him on the island where they underwent bizarre martial-arts style training regimes, were whipped and shackled, and almost killed their one-armed teammate have similar problems returning to situations that are less satisfying than they hoped. A wimpy pitcher despised by his son returns to find him unimpressed, while another discovers his wife had temporarily left him, and an incredibly short man, Kyeong-do, who’d been bothering a bank employee so much she switched branches to avoid him discovers she’s engaged to another man. Kyeong-do refuses to give up, arrogantly telling her that he’ll be replacing her groom on the big day while continuing to behave like a massive creep but actually successful in the end because of his sporting and financial success though it looks more like a case of her giving in than actually falling for him and sends some very mixed messages about a woman’s agency in this still conservative age. 

The players brand themselves losers and outsiders, each of them in some way compromised and locked out of pro-baseball from Kyeong-do’s short stature to Hye-seong’s poverty though the decision to include a mixed race man which may have been intended as a progressive gesture seriously backfires by having a Korean actor perform in blackface while insensitively mimicking racial stereotypes. The coach, Byeong-ho is also an outsider by virtue of walking with a cane and purposefully creates a team of others like himself he can train with his cruel and bizarre methods to take on the Dong-taks of the world. Even so, others brand them “inhuman”, “beasts trained with whips”, and continue to resent their attempt to subvert the contemporary class order. 

On the surface, however, Lee has simply made a baseball film about a group of outsiders who triumph over adversity. He fills it with the spirit of the times, throwing in several sequences accompanied by contemporary pop songs along with an atmosphere of ridiculous excess not to mention inconsequentiality as if he were actively mocking the current direction of Korean cinema despite the occasional moment of artistry such as the gothic scene in which Um-ji realises Hye-seong has returned but the pair are separated by a billowing white curtain. An oddity, but perhaps one that speaks of the oddity of its times. 

Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Lee Jang-ho, 1985)

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“The commoners get to have all the fun” a lady in waiting laments to her mistress in Lee Jang-ho’s historical drama set in the reign of good king Sejeong, Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Eo Udong). It is however the titular heroine Eoudong’s (Lee Bo-hee) determination to enjoy herself that becomes a threat to the social order, not only in her ability to subvert the Confucianist philosophies of the era by making men her playthings but doing so with those not of noble birth. 

Legends seem to surround Euodong, a little more of her history revealed with each step in the investigation into the murder of a man she had slept with at a festival. The man had attempted to rape her, but Eoudong was soon able to gain the upper hand in the situation, realising that he is a servant boy who often visited her home. She sleeps with him willingly, dominating him by getting on top and making it about her pleasure and agency rather than his. Soon after she leaves, however, the boy is killed by an assassin apparently hired by her cruel and perverse husband, who is technically the king’s uncle, to tidy up after her. 

Set in 1479, the film is clear in its criticism of the feudal order while insisting that it is the nobles who are the most constrained because they must act by these arcane codes to which the commoners are not subject. The commoners revel at their festival, something more or less forbidden in the revered word of the court and most particularly for a woman like Euodong who craves freedom and excitement, longing to fly like a bird. People of often say of her that should have been born a commoner where her behaviour would not be regarded as so deeply problematic to the social order in its direct attack on notions of class and gender. Though she herself is niece to the prime minister, an assassin (Ahn Sung-ki) is later hired to neuter the threat she poses though there is a kind of care in the unusual request, instructing that death should come suddenly and without pain. Afterwards, the assassin should be sure to bury her in her beautiful place. 

The assassin, however also has a painful past in which in which he was quite literally castrated for a similar kind of transgression of class boundaries having become friends with a young noblewoman. While he lost his penis, his friend lost his tongue so that he would never speak of what happened rendering them both outcasts left with no option but to serve the system that had harmed them by becoming spies and assassins. Eoudong’s rebellion is towards this same system, a system in which women are regarded as worthless if they do not serve their proper function. Married at an early age, some recount that Eoudong was once cheerful but less so after her marriage. Her husband rarely visited her and in fact took a concubine but she was still blamed for the “failure” to conceive a child and threatened with the shame of being sent back to her birth family. In this era, a woman was forbidden from remarrying even in widowhood while it was relatively easy for a man to divorce his wife. Simply “talking back” was enough grounds to send a woman packing. 

The opening and closing text reminds us that the feudal era was “the hardest time for Korean women” if also perhaps inviting us to consider what our times are like too, insisting that Eoudong lives on in the hearts of oppressed women as one who fiercely resisted the constraints of her era. Lee roots the corruption firmly in the king, who is indeed the patriarch of a nation and presider over an oppressive social order founded on shame and misogyny as a means of maintaining male power. Coloured with the softcore excesses of ‘80s Korean cinema, Lee nevertheless signals the crushing austerity of noble life which slowly erodes the soul in robbing it of emotional fulfilment or individuality saving the artiest of his sex scenes for that between the liberated woman and an emasculated man each betrayed by the society in which they live and seeking the only escape that it presents itself to them. 

The Geisha (陽暉楼, Hideo Gosha, 1983)

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The coming of the railroad spells doom for one of the most prestigious geisha houses in Japan in Hideo Gosha’s adaptation of the Tomiko Miyao novel, The Geisha (陽暉楼, Yokiro). Miyao’s novels had often provided the inspiration for Gosha’s films and she had herself been the daughter of a “flesh broker” in pre-war Kochi though later escaping to another town to be a substitute teacher. Though the English title may more centre plight of the the individual geisha at its centre, the Japanese hints more at the destructive cycle of the Yokiro itself in the persistent legacy of exploitation.

Then again as he later points out, if you’re looking for a villain in this story then the responsibility lies largely with Daikatsu (Ken Ogata) himself. In a prologue set in 1913, Daikatsu has eloped with geisha Otsuru but the pair are discovered by gangsters sent after them by the Yokiro. Daikatsu kills all of their assailants and assures Otsuru that they are finally “free” but it appears to be too late. Holding their baby daughter in one arm, Otsuru collapses into his other and presumably dies either then or shortly after while Daikatsu is later sent to prison for 10 years. 20 years later in 1933, the daughter, Fusako (Kimiko Ikegami), has become the number one geisha at the Yokiro under the name Momowaka though her career flounders because she is regarded as too emotionally distant to keep a patron. 

Daikatsu is also himself in Kochi at this point and working as a procurer brokering the sale of young women to the Yokiro and other geisha houses and brothels. When a school teacher comes to him to sell his wife, he taps her teeth to check for malnutrition much as one would examine a horse before running a hand underneath her kimono to check everything is at is should be before offering a valuation. Her husband only looks at him anxiously enquiring if a body such as hers which has as he later reveals born three children will fetch a good price. Daikatsu lets them go so the woman, Masae, can spend a final night with her family explaining that he cannot force someone to work if they do not want to do so and is well aware they will likely take his money and never be seen again which is what almost what happens. As it turns out the husband is killed in a fight and the woman ends up becoming a geisha anyway, only in the pay of prominent Osaka yakuza led by Inaso. 

Inaso (Mikio Narita) and buddies want in on the construction of the railroad that will shortly be coming to Kochi, but need to take over the town first which means getting around the mistress of the Yokiro, Osode (Mitsuko Baisho), who is apparently running every game town. The entire local economy is underpinned by female exploitation and facilitated by a woman, a former geisha, seizing the only power that is available to her. Isano later uses Masae as a kind of spy, getting her to initiate a relationship with Osode’s weak willed husband in an attempt to humiliate her which largely backfires as Osode boldly reclaims her man through a violent brawl in a hot spring though it does not appear that she is especially fond of him so much as he serves a particular purpose.

The brawl emphases the way in which women are pitted against each other by the nature of a patriarchal society along with the ways in which they are forced to mediate their power through men. Fusako also gets into an intense physical fight with Tamako (Atsuko Asano), a surrogate daughter of Daikatsu’s and emblem of a coming modernity, who insists on becoming a sex worker at the area’s most prominent brothel. In a strange moment of confrontation, both the geishas of the Yokiro dressed in their traditional regalia, and the sex workers of Tamamizu, arrive at a modern club where the heir to a banking empire courted by the Yokiro, Saganoi, dances the Charleston he learned while studying abroad in America. The geisha who dances with him struggles to pick up the moves, Saganoi lamenting that the dance is just not suited to a woman wearing a heavy kimono, elaborate wig, and clumsy geta. Tamako immediately gets up from her table and kicks off her shoes, gathering the hem of her own kimono to free her legs for the high level kicks of the modern dance. 

Fusako reclaims her authority by interrupting the dance immediately before its conclusion and insisting on retrieving their guest. Tamako appears to resent Fusako, perhaps frustrated in her relationship with Daisuke who does not appear to have had much contact with the daughter he sold at 12 years old. They too end up in an elaborate brawl in which Tamako rips off Fusako’s wig and splits her lip, symbolically freeing her to transcend the constraints of her “geisha” persona. Meeting Saganoi at Western-style bar, she boldly dances on the counter and sleeps with him of her own volition. But in doing so she conceives a child and leaves herself in a difficult position. She has betrayed her patron, and though she could simply have kept the fact from him and allowed him to think the baby was his, Fusako does not want to bring her child up in lies while simultaneously hanging on to a naive dream that Saganoi will one day return to her despite being made aware he has left for Europe. 

“All men are enemies of women,” she writhes in childbirth while swearing that no one will take her child from her, but she is still an indentured woman and her daughter is by rights the property of Osode. Her illness, presumably consumption, began long before her pregnancy and seems to an echo of the suffering she has been forced to endure as a geisha. As her health weakens, so the Yokiro declines. First it is ravaged by a literal storm, but also under threat from the Osaka gangsters desperate to take over Kochi to gain access to the lucrative construction contracts extending in its direction. Even so, as Daikatsu admits much of the fault lies with him. He chose to elope with Otsuru and was unable to protect either her or their daughter whom he allowed meet the same fate by entering the geisha world. He continued to earn his money by selling women into what is essentially slavery, and cannot escape his part in their continued exploitation while his entanglement with gangsters later disrupts the more settled life Tamako has begun to build for herself. 

“Wait all you want, the train’s not coming,” Tamako is later told, as if signalling that there really is no way out of this destructive and disappointing existence. Truly epic in scope, Gosha’s pre-war drama draws together patriarchal exploitation and societal corruption to critique a burgeoning modernity, but ends exactly as it started among the vibrant cherry blossoms only this time undercutting the melancholy of the oft repeated song with a more cheerful scene hinting at least symbolically at a long-awaited reunion. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Man with Three Coffins (나그네는 길에서도 쉬지 않는다, Lee Jang-ho, 1987)

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“What a piteous soul who wanders around with sorrow.” The echoes of a funeral song haunt the melancholy hero of Lee Jang-ho’s Division Film, The Man With Three Coffins (나그네는 길에서도 쉬지 않는다, Nageuneneun kileseodo swiji anhneunda). Adapting a novel by Lee Je-ha, Lee Jang-ho positions the divided nation as a more literal kind of limbo filled with wandering ghosts and souls who no longer have a home to return to in which the echoes of shamanism ring with fatalistic intensity.

In Lee’s elliptical screenplay, moments replay and reverberate in a stream of memory that echoes the protagonist’s fractured state of being. What eventually becomes apparent is that he is on a quest to return his wife’s ashes to her hometown, the problem is that she was one of many displaced by the Korean War. She became separated from her parents and no longer knew where her hometown was except somewhere in the North. The man who is being discussed in the opening sequence, Mr Kim, is also on a quest to return to his hometown but like that of Sun-seok’s wife (Lee Bo-hee) it lies in the North and it is unlikely he can reach it. The old man tightly grips a photograph of his family before the war, finally releasing it only when some henchman working for his son who only sees the South as his home come to retrieve him and destroy his hopes of dying in the place where he was born.

During his journey, Sun-seok (Kim Myung-gon) passes a sign which reads “Road to Reunification” but the bridge alongside it has been removed with only the supports remaining like thorns embedded in the landscape. Another sign reads “Restricted Area” marking the line beyond which Sun-seok cannot pass, like the man in the funeral song unable to pass through mountain or water. As he nears his destination, Sun-seok’s paths are blocked by snow preventing him from moving on or from returning to his ordinary life in Seoul. He is in more ways than one a purgatorial figure, a man already dead but trapped in the mortal realm even as the shamans attempt to guide him towards his rightful direction, a direction which Sun-seok may finally realise only on witnessing a woman with whom he may have fallen in love join in with the shamanistic dance though she two had been as soulless as he was and it may be impossible to say which of them is bound for the land of the dead. 

Mrs. Choi (Lee Bo-hee), the only woman given a name, remarks that a shaman had told her that at 30 she would meet a man by a river who was carrying three coffins and that this man was her husband in a previous life. This might explain why all of Sun-seok’s women are played by the same actress, as if they are all echoes of the same soul though equally it could reflect Sun-seok’s myopic view in which there is only ever really one woman. In any case, their connection seems both fated and frustrated because in this divided world there are only ever partings. Unable to reach his destination, Sun-seok scatters his wife’s ashes in the closest town to the DMZ, the same town where Mrs Choi and Mr Kim are also prevented from moving forward though in this case pulled back towards the soulless capitalism of the contemporary South as symbolised by Mr Kim’s son and his political ambitions. 

The implication is that is the division itself which caused the death of Sun-seok’s wife, ultimately unable to reconcile the division within herself and eventually consumed by it. Her death is echoed in that of a sex worker who dies gripping her throat and foaming at the mouth shortly after an encounter with Sun-seok, while a sex worker he meets in another town suffers a similar fate as if he were somehow spreading death along his way bringing him to his three coffins, which are in a way one and also four including perhaps his own. The washed out red of Lee’s distinctive colour palate lends the dusty land a hellish glow while the unusual camera techniques, a copulating couple superimposed on Sun-seok’s playing cards and a giant hand suddenly appearing in the sky for example, add a sense of ominous dread enhanced by the constant intrusions of shamanic ritual. It seems that as the song says, a funeral lament for a boy who disappeared feared drowned but also for Sun-seok himself, he really can’t go anywhere and is condemned to wander, a lost soul in a divided land who cannot any longer return to his home.

To Trap a Kidnapper (誘拐報道, Shunya Ito, 1982)

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One of a number of films released in the early ’80s critical of the police force, To Trap a Kidnapper (誘拐報道, Yukai Hodo) draws inspiration from a real life case of child abduction but suggests that the police largely just get in the way and are only interested in apprehending the culprit rather than ensuring the boy’s safety. In any case, unlike the similarly themed High and Low, the film devotes most of its focus to the kidnapper’s desperation as a man apparently left behind by the rapidly rising tides of prosperity. 

Yet somewhat perversely the film opens with a scene of children playing and seven-year-old Hideyuki (Motoyoshi Wada) getting into trouble for flicking toy discs at his friend and deskmate Kaori (Kaori Takahashi). Hideyuki is then made to stand on his own in the playground as a punishment, though quickly makes things up to Kaori by gifting her the plastic discs he was playing with. Neither of them know it, but the children share a grim connection for it’s Kaori’s father Kazuo (Kenichi Hagiwara) who is responsible for kidnapping Hideyuki on his way home from school in the next town over.

Both Hideyuki and Kaori attend a prestigious private institution but are being raised in very different circumstances. Kazuo was once a successful cafe owner but was swindled out of his business and is now in massive debt to a shady loanshark named Moriyasu who’s sold his promissory note on to a third party debt collector. Hideyuki’s father, Noboru Mitamura (Fujita Okamoto), is a doctor though there’s nothing that suggests the family is anything more than financially comfortable and they aren’t immediately able to get the money together for the ransom. Noboru has to ring round all his friends, family, and random acquaintances begging for emergency loans but without really being able to explain why he needs the money. Just having seen it noted on a school register that Hideyuki’s dad was medical professional Kazuo assumed they’d be a good target for a kidnapping and is in any case resentful of their nice middle class life. 

His wife, Yoshie (Rumiko Koyanagi), is in turn resentful of Kazuo for their reduced circumstances later lamenting that they moved house, swapped their big car for a smaller one and are even going to rehome their dog but if Kazuo is really so deeply in debt, something he had kept from her, then nothing they do really matters because their lives will never improve. What she can’t understand is why Kazuo was so keen on keeping Kaori in a private school that he’d get himself into financial hell rather than make a more pragmatic decision to let her go somewhere else. The obsession perhaps hints at his class anxiety, wanting his daughter to stay in a more resolutely middle class environment otherwise in strong contrast to the hometown he later visits where his elderly mother operates a loom in a moribund fishing village which the youngsters are slowly leaving for jobs in factories in neighbouring towns. 

Perhaps in over his head, it at one point looks like Kazuo is about to dump Hideyuki’s body in the sea only to realise police divers are already searching the area. Despite himself, he begins to care for the boy though doesn’t really know what to do with him. He feeds him bread from convenience stores and keeps him tied up in the boot of his car wrapped in several blankets without really considering the possibility that he may die of cold or hypothermia left outside in the freezing winter. Realising the distraught parents have called in the police despite his warnings not to, he is too afraid to accept the ransom and is therefore at something of an impasse given he can’t very well give up the boy without getting the money.

Meanwhile, as the Japanese title implies the tale is alternately told from the perspective of the reporters at Yomiuri Shinbun who are originally quite annoyed by the police’s request for a news blackout to avoid panicking the kidnapper, suggesting it’s an infringement on their free speech if coming around in the acceptance that a child’s life is at stake. A rookie reporter, Kotaro (Shin Takuma) is involved in a dispute with his fiancée Tomo (Miwako Fujitani) who is having second thoughts because he’s always working while her parents are pressuring her to consider an arranged marriage. Kotaro refuses to write one of the dummy articles they’re putting together in the event that Hideyuki is killed describing it as morbid and irresponsible, but is very involved with the ongoing press investigation which simultaneously seems more rigorous than that of the police and accidentally gets in its way. A “suspicious car” that’s noticed outside a drop sport turns out to belong not to the kidnapper but a reporter on a stakeout wasting the police’s time.

Even they are eventually conflicted, the officer in charge on the ground later letting the Mitamuras leave on their own for the final drop empathising with them as a fellow parent and acknowledging the reason everything keeps going wrong is because the police got involved. Yet his boss orders him to follow them anyway, reminding him that the only job of the police is to catch the culprit seemingly indifferent to whether or not they rescue the hostage unharmed. Their tactics are quite naive, not considering that Kazuo will obviously realise that the Mitamuras are surrounded by undercover officers because they keep using the same ones and it’s odd to keep seeing that couple from the coffee shop everywhere they go. The big break in the case happens by accident just because a couple of traffic cops decide to ask a random car a few questions.

In any case, it’s Kaori who ends up suffering. She and her mother are also victims, unfairly hounded by the press and left with nowhere to go and no-one to turn to having had their lives turned upside down by her father’s desperate decision. He didn’t even know the kids were friends or the effect his actions would have on his daughter. Kazuo hadn’t really thought any of this through but acted only in jealousy and resentment, wanting payback against the Mitamuras for their nice middle class life and his own slice of the pie that he felt had been denied to him. In the end, the only winners are the press who can rejoice in selling their newspapers even if a remorseful Kotaro resents himself for taking a paparazzo photo of Yoshie and Kaori trying to leave town quietly. On seeing his article pasted on pillars at the station, even Tomo starts to change her mind reflecting that if he’s working on a story like this then perhaps working too much isn’t such a dealbreaker after all even if everyone seems to have forgotten about little Hideyuki in the headlong rush to dominate the newsstands by trying to lure a kidnapper into their trap.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Door (Banmei Takahashi, 1988)

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You like to think you’re safe behind closed doors, that nothing that happens behind them is anybody’s business and you’re free to be yourself. But a door is as much about keeping things in as it is about keeping them out and perhaps you’re not as in control of it as you thought. Arriving at the tail end of the Bubble era, Banmei Takahashi’s giallo-esque home invasion thriller is at heart about insecurity, a feeling of anxiety and ever impending doom under the watchful eyes of a judgemental society. 

At least, Yasuko (Keiko Takahashi) feels the eyes of her neighbours keenly on her, nervously attempting to live up to the role that’s been assigned to her as a moderately affluent housewife in a nice middle-class area that is nevertheless full of hazards even if many of them are social and psychological rather than directly physical. We can feel her discomfort when an anonymous neighbour passive aggressively returns her rubbish to her front door when she attempts to throw it out on the incorrect day, her husband’s (Shiro Shimomoto) advice simply to make sure she follows the bin day timetable correctly in the future. Another neighbour whose face is also not seen later stares at her when she drops a tissue that has been placed in her letterbox by a salesman (Daijiro Tsutsumi) who is harassing her, forcing Yasuko to pick it back up and take to her own apartment to dispose of lest she be judged for failing to obey this simple rule of urban living despite realising that the tissue likely contains unpleasant bodily fluids. 

The great mystery is why Yasuko, who clearly finds the salesman’s attentions threatening, does not immediately hang up when he calls her but continues to listen to his ominous conversation which heavily implies he is close by and watching her. Previously he’d daubed an obscene message on her front door branding her as “sexually frustrated” which as it turns out may not be far off the mark. Her husband is largely absent and often works away. When he returns she tries to wake him up after putting their son to bed, but he’s dead to the world and leaves the next morning having explained that he’ll be away the next three nights due to a colleague falling ill. Among the junk mail delivered to their flat were a series of business cards for cabaret bars that he jokingly suggested keeping, though as it turns out he really is at work and not spinning a yarn for a three-day jaunt with a mistress even if you could make a case that he’s in an extra-marital affair with his career. Yasuko almost says as much when she calls and tells him she’s scared but he refuses to come home, crying out that he obviously has no regard for his wife and child. 

It’s clear that the economic demands of the late Bubble era have endangered the traditional family even as they’ve provided a level of financial comfort that enables Yasuko to live in this “nice” apartment even if it’s perhaps only ordinarily nice for a middling middle-class couple living a stereotypically middle-class suburban life. Yasuko’s sense of anxiety partly stems from being constantly observed by those around her in an alienating urban environment but also suggests an insecurity in her social status which is after all dependent on a financial security which may be about to disappear as the Bubble bursts. The home is also a burden, and the space behind the door one of isolation rather than safety that leaves her feeling vulnerable and alone in the continual absence of her husband. 

Tellingly all of the voices she hears other than his (and their son’s) are filtered as if they were speaking to her via telephone. She has two handsets in her home, one belonging to the phone itself, black with an answering machine, and the other to the intercom, white and wall-mounted, which is intended to give her control over her door but which in the end offers little comfort just like the near pointless chain-lock intended to keep strangers at arm’s length but in reality easily breakable. In this society of ultra-politeness simply not answering an urgent knocking may not be an option, but behind the door Yasuko is also lonely so perhaps those nuisance cold calls telling her she’s won a cruise, encouraging her to take up English conversation classes, or maybe join a cult, are not really so much of a nuisance at all simultaneously interrupting her loneliness while also penetrating the protective sanctuary of the private space of the home much as the salesman will eventually do in physically breaking a protective barrier. 

When Yasuko fights back, she does so with a housewife’s weapons such as carving forks and chopping boards even picking up her son’s rollerblades to enlist him in the resistance. Takahashi films the final confrontation from above in a complex aerial shot that suggests a literal cat and mouse game as if Yasuko were intent on ejecting a stubborn rodent from her home, the rounded, doorless entranceways between rooms almost like oversized mouse holes in a scene from a cartoon. The question is whether Yasuko can in fact protect this space, a space which represents her family, in overcoming her own anxieties and the latent dark desire which draws her towards her stalker in her loneliness and lack of fulfilment. Yet the answer doesn’t quite lie in perfecting the persona of the perfect housewife even if it could on one level be argued that she’s saved by another kind of male protector but in taking care of business and reasserting her control over the space by means of resetting its boundaries very much on her own terms.

Door is released in the UK on blu-ray 30th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

Those Swell Yakuza (極道渡世の素敵な面々, Seiji Izumi, 1988)

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The yakuza movies of the post-war era had largely depicted the gangster world as being one of internecine desperation and even if the hero was a pure-hearted defender of a traditional honour code those around him were anything but honourable. By the late 1980s, however, the yakuza were increasingly seen as an outdated institution amid the high rise office blocks of a prosperous Bubble-era Japan in which the street thug had given way to more corporatised kinds of organised crime. 

This might help to explain the ironic title of Seiji Izumi’s 1988 comedy Those Swell Yakuza (極道渡世の素敵な面々, Yakuza Tosei no Sutekina Menmen) which simultaneously presents a nostalgic view of gangster cool and a way of life which is more rooted in the everyday existence of a contemporary petty outlaw. The hero, 24-year-old Ryo (Takanori Jinnai), is a former banker who evidently rejected the heavily corporatised nature of the Bubble-era society and left his stable job to open a record store which subsequently went bankrupt leaving him with huge debts to yakuza loansharks. It’s these debts he’s trying to escape by wandering into a mahjong parlour and getting carried away with his early success despite the advice of steady hand Nakagawa (Takeshi Kusaka) who eventually covers his losses when it turns out that Ryo started playing without any stake money. A ageing yakuza, Nakagawa takes him outside to teach him a lesson explaining that the parlour is run by Taiwanese gangsters and he’s lucky to be leaving with his life. Nevertheless, Nakagawa is impressed by his hutzpah and leaves his business card in case Ryo has the desire to get in touch. 

Ryo’s decision to become a yakuza reflects both a sense of emptiness in the Bubble-era society and a nostalgic longing for post-war gangsterism and the theoretical “freedom” is represents to a man like Ryo though of course there’s not so much autonomy to be had in the life of a petty footsoldier who is always beholden to the whims of his boss. Nakagawa becomes to him a kind of father figure, though he’s also someone who has largely lost out in having achieved little in the realms of gangsterdom while his friend and contemporary Kanzaki (Hideo Murota) has successfully climbed the ladder to become a high ranking officer. Kanzaki takes him to task for visiting the mahjong parlour in part because the Taiwanese gang has gained a reputation for dealing with drugs of which their organisation does not approve and it would present a problem if his connections to them were to come out during any potential anti-drug action by the police. By the film’s conclusion, Nakagawa has become something of a tragic figure more or less excluded from the yakuza world while his body is ravaged by alcoholism and his finances by gambling addiction. 

Ryo, meanwhile, seems to live the yakuza dream. He gets stabbed while defending a bar hostess from a yakuza from a different gang and then meets the love of his life, Keiko (Yumi Aso), who similarly rejects the constraints of the contemporary society by refusing the marriage arranged by her father for his own benefit to spend three years waiting for Ryo who goes to prison after shooting Kanzaki in the arm to avenge a slight against Nakagawa who also cuts off his finger to fulfil the codes of yakuza honour. Wandering around in sunshades and flashy suits, Ryo soon attracts a fiercely loyal band of followers of his own and despite the tragedy of losing one of his men to an assassin proves adept in navigating the yakuza world to present an idealised image of masculine cool perfectly tailored to the Bubble era.

Despite the shooting that landed him in prison and the mission of revenge he leaves his own wedding (after the ceremony) to complete in the film’s conclusion, Ryo’s yakuza existence is otherwise fairly non-violent and based in a kind of trickery that makes him seem clever rather than exploitative given that as Nakagawa had suggested the way forward for the modern yakuza is scams not drugs. As one of his prison buddies puts it, there are old school gangsters like Ryo ready to die for the clan, and then there are those like himself intent on filling their boots. Largely, most of these guys are old school yakuza who do obey the code and have some kind of scruples about how they make their money which adds to their aspirational allure as Ryo seems to lead a fairly charmed life of idealised masculinity with a pretty wife and fancy apartment seemingly free of the petty oppressions faced by workaday salarymen. Izumi makes frequent reference to classic Toei gangster pictures from a decade previously with appearance from from genre stalwarts such as Hideo Murota, Nobuo Ando, and Mikio Narita, but lends the action a contemporary spin in the ironic sense of cool even if the implications of ambiguous ending may be far less upbeat.

Like a Savage (野蛮人のように, Toru Kawashima, 1985)

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Hiroko Yakushimaru had been the breakout star of Haruki Kadokawa’s idol cinema in the early 1980s, but as she approached her 20th birthday had developed an increasing desire to retire and leave the showbiz world behind. Having won the prestigious Blue Ribbon Best Actress award for her role in W’s Tragedy, she ended her contract with the studio but following the outcry over news of her intention to retire ultimately set up on her own as an independent performer with her own management company. 

Like a Savage (野蛮人のように, Yabanjin no Youni) was her first project after moving on from Kadokawa and was intended to signal a new phase in her career though incorporating many of the elements that had made her teen idol films so successful. This time around, she plays a character seemingly a few years above her actual age though in other ways childlike and something of a fantasist. Tamako is a blocked novelist in her mid-20s who had tremendous success with her first work published when she was only 15. Ostensibly, she leads an incredibly aspirational life living in a beautiful cabin on the beach where she tries to write sitting out in the sun on her terrace. In the opening sequences, we see her taking a break by reading a novel in English while she also shows a knowledge of French which adds to her intellectual credentials and sense of contemporary sophistication. 

But it seems that she may be bored with this seemingly charmed life and is having trouble gaining inspiration because she’s become too comfortable. She also has a capricious selfish streak, randomly abandoning her friends who’ve come for a fireworks party by driving her open-topped jeep all the way into the centre of Roppongi “to find adventure in the night”. Adventure ends up finding her when she’s unwittingly drawn into underworld intrigue after being mistaken for a sex worker who was with a yakuza boss immediately before he was assassinated, as it turns out by one of his own men intent on succession but trying to disguise his ham-fisted bid for power as turf war. Teaming up with yakuza-adjacent fixer Eiji (Kyohei Shibata) she finds herself on the run before eventually taking him back to the cabin to hide out and recuperate from a stab wound. 

Yakushimaru had played similar roles as a teen star, but adds an adult edge as Tamako chain smokes and is almost always drinking, in fact being seven sheets to the wind while driving the jeep to the city. In other ways, however, she retains a childlike quality most obviously in the film’s repeated to references to Alice in Wonderland which paint the contemporary capital as a fantastical place coloured by her own literary imagination. In her flight through the city, she passes what seems to be a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, while there’s also a neon sign featuring what looks like the Cheshire Cat grinning wildly in the Cabaret-influenced drag bar where Eiji works in which a performer dressed as Sally Bowles sings in French and many of the waiters are implied to be trans or gay. When the gangsters finally surround the beach house in the final act, a pottery figurine of a rabbit with a stopwatch is obliterated by their bullets as if to remind her that she’s not in Wonderland anymore and all of this is “real” rather than the romanticised fantasy she may have bought into while nursing a handsome yakuza back to health by the sea. 

Even so, the city has its darkness. The girl who really was with the yakuza boss when he died twice gives her age as only 15, one of many Eiji shepherded around as part of his yakuza-adjacent job. The head yakuza has an eerie presence deepened by the use of a strange voice effect whenever he speaks, while Kawashima captures a fantastical side of Bubble-era Tokyo lit by the warm glow of hazy neon. In a moment of irony, a large sign on the building where the yakuza boss met his end reads “Desire” with its letters finally flickering out to leave just “Die” as if to tell us this rampantly consumerist city of darkness will eventually consume all those who cannot escape its allure. 

In any case, Tamako finds herself literally blowing up her world to cure her existential crisis reflecting that life is like a firework destined to burn out bright. What she experiences is another kind of rebirth, the climactic shootout occurring on her birthday which Eiji, who does not know his date of birth presumably having been abandoned as a baby, later adopts as his own. Surprisingly stylish and generally upbeat despite the darkness around its edges, Kawashima’s zeitgeisty action drama captures something of an age of ennui in which fantasy is the only escape from the emptiness of a neon-lit Tokyo. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)