Tag: Akihiko Matsumoto

Bayside Shakedown 2 (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 2 レインボーブリッジを封鎖せよ！, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2003)

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A big screen outing for a popular TV drama, Bayside Shakedown proved a runaway box office hit on its release in 1998. Five years later the team at Wangan Police Station are back and much seems to have changed even as the sequel cleverly mirrors the first instalment, but where the earlier film had satirically taken aim at chronic underfunding and excessive bureaucracy, Bayside Shakedown 2 (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 2 レインボーブリッジを封鎖せよ！, Odoru Daisosasen the movie 2: Rainbow Bridge wo Fuusa seyo!) ultimately ends a defence of authority in the face of criminal anarchy. 

Five years on, the team are faced with yet another difficult serial killer case in which top CEOs are being bumped off and artfully posed in public places next to a rotten apple, once again necessitating the arrival of the guys from HQ. This time, however, Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), a friend of earnest detective Aoshima (Yûji Oda), has been pushed to the sidelines in favour of the big wigs’ latest favourite, Okita (Miki Maya), who has a much more authoritarian view of policing than many at Wangan are comfortable with. Meanwhile, Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) and Aoshima are busy with their own cases, a pickpocketing family and a “vampire” who bites high school girls’ hair and then runs off respectively, but all the office is a twitter over a love letter penned by their boss and accidentally emailed to everyone in the station because of a computer virus. 

Former Wangan guy Mashita (Yusuke Santamaria), who had transferred to the city, returns having trained as a negotiator but for some reason mostly doing profiling and eventually figuring out that their killers are likely disenfranchised salarymen made redundant by their companies amid the backdrop of a stagnant economy. With no hope for the future, they’ve turned against society and started an anarchist revolution as a collective without leaders. “No bosses, no workers. No ordering, no obeying. No firing, no being fired,” they explain of their principle of equality, adding, “when there’s a leader the individual means nothing”. On one level the film sympathises with them in recognising the pressures they’re facing and unfairness of the economic reality, while simultaneously condemning the idea of a horizontal society. “If the leader is good then the group is strong,” Aoshima explains to them though of course they don’t agree. 

Then again, he says this immediately Muroi has resumed command in the knowledge that he is a “good” leader precisely because he trusts those under him and gives them the freedom to exercise their own judgement in contrast to Okita whose authoritarian micromanaging is soon exposed as a cover for under confidence. A police officer is seriously injured during an operation because she hesitates to make a decision, while both Sumire and Aoshima are forced to let their suspects escape when Okita orders them to stay at their post trying to protect a woman she has effectively decided to use as bait. “Organisations don’t need emotion,” she insists, later irritated by the officers’ reluctance to follow her command when she simply instructs them to “replace” the critically injured officer as if their life were completely disposable. 

Just in the first film, Sumire and Aoshima are forced to question the value of local policing in the face of Okita’s elitism as she tells them that their individual cases can wait because the murder takes priority, describing them as “just local stuff”. “Punch ups and pickpockets, what a waste of police time,” she adds leaving each of them feeling as if their work has no meaning and is not useful to or valued by the community. Aoshima only gets his mojo back after remembering an act of kindness done to him by someone he’d helped in the past, realising that even small things have a positive effect on the society and are always worth doing. That said, he’s not especially sympathetic towards the teenage “vampire” victim largely because he only bit her hair but later gets on the case after more girls turn up with bite marks on their necks. 

In the end it is indeed the local which is good, Okita’s failure allowing Muroi to make good on his promise and allow the local police to do their jobs rather than being relegated to boring legwork such as traffic stops and trawling surveillance footage. Despite having rejected the leaderless anarchy of the villain’s horizontal society, Muroi’s first instruction is to “forget rank, forget class” and have everyone work together encouraging the local cops to help them identify the kinds of places only a local would know which might not be on the map and may be a good hideout for the assassins. There might be something uncomfortable in Aoshima’s insistence on the necessity of a leader in the implicit defence of the hierarchal society, but then Muroi is a good leader who can indeed be trusted wield his power well largely because he trusts those below him, while a weak leader like Okita who holds tight to power because they don’t have the confidence to wield it freely is worse than no leader at all. Once again ending on a note of ironic police accountability, Bayside Shakedown 2 takes aim at the inequalities of the modern society but ultimately makes the case for the value of compassionate local policing in which all crimes at least are treated equally.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Bayside Shakedown (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 1998)

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Those who believe that Japanese cinema has continued to decline throughout the 21st century often cite the release of Bayside Shakedown (踊る大捜査線, Odoru Daisosasen) as a turning point arguing that its vast and unexpected success ushered in an era of populist filmmaking dominated by existing franchises such as television drama, manga, and light novels. Leaving aside the question of whether the industry can really be said to be in a creative decline, the criticism is in itself a little unfair in that the film is exactly what it’s intended to be, perfectly enjoyable mainstream entertainment, while like the television series quietly subversive in its criticisms of police bureaucracy using humour to make subtle digs at the service in a way more “serious” films may not be able to. 

Director Katsuyuki Motohiro signals his intentions in the opening scene in which grizzled, trenchcoat-wearing detective Aoshima (Yuji Oda) stakes out a pleasant suburban house later joined by two colleagues who appear equally serious, yet as it turns out they aren’t on the look out for criminals but simply waiting for their boss, Police Commissioner Yoshida (Shigeru Koyama), to emerge so they can drive him to a police golfing tournament. Ironically enough, the scene is soon repeated, only for Yoshida to be tasered and kidnapped for ransom. Meanwhile, another difficult case arises when a body is found floating in a local river and is discovered to have been murdered, a soft toy found sewn into his stomach. 

The bizarre murder is a problem for the detectives at Wangan Police Station because whenever there’s a difficult case they have to call in the guys from HQ and are then financially responsible for them which is why the guys in accounts would really rather they write down suicide and leave it at that. Budgetary constraints are a persistent theme, the other random case hovering in the background being a phantom thief who keeps stealing the detectives’ receipts so they can’t claim their expenses. In any case, the kidnapping means HQ are involved anyway, quickly taking over an upper floor of the station and locking the local cops out of their investigation or else relegating them to demeaning leg work such as traffic stops and info gathering. 

The conflict between HQ and the local branch is further brought out by the awkward friendship between careerist policeman Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba) and the earnest Aoshima who have each made a promise to each other that Muroi will climb the ladder while Aoshima takes care of business in the streets to ensure the police force continues to function correctly. Muroi is however in a difficult position, another officer informing him that he’s being put in charge because he’d be an easy fall guy as he went to a regional college while the others are all Todai alumni and minded to look out for each other. He finds himself compromised, unable to keep his promise to Aoshima because of the pressure from above while feeling guilty about the way the local cops are being treated by the bigwigs from the city. Meanwhile the police chiefs sit around a large circular table not unlike the war room in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove issuing orders via video link while spending most of their time trying to make sure the local force is sidelined and squabbling over who actually gets to make an arrest. 

Pressured over their expenses, expected to work long hours, and generally made to feel unappreciated the detectives start to wonder what it’s all for, energetic female detective Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) in particular keeping a resignation letter in her desk uncertain whether or not to hand it in. Nevertheless through their quest to save the commissioner along with all the other cases including a potential serial killer operating through a murder fantasy website and a thief who seems to enjoy sneaking into people’s workplaces and stealing small personal items including those of the police officers, they each come to re-appreciate the importance of compassionate local policing along with their responsibility to each other as friends and colleagues even making sure they hold their fellow officers to account especially those involved with the budget. Lighthearted in tone yet boasting a fair few impressive action sequences Bayside Shakedown has in the past been unfairly maligned but is undeniably entertaining with a series of solid mysteries at its centre along with a few jibes at the overly bureaucratised nature of modern policing. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn (天間荘の三姉妹, Ryuhei Kitamura, 2022)

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Caught in a space of existential limbo, a young woman struggles with the uncertain nature of life. What’s the point of living in a world that might end, she asks herself, seemingly not having realised that it’s as it always was, the world is always ending and may blink out at any given second. Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of the manga by Tsutomu Takahashi The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn (天間荘の三姉妹, Tenma so no San Shimai) plays out a little like a mashup of Hirokazu Korea’s Afterlife and Our Little Sister, but ultimately meditates on how to live on in the shadow of loss.

After all, as the relentlessly cheerful heroine Tamae (Non) later says, life is hard but the world is not so bad and everyone has their part to play. That’s something she discovers for herself after falling into a coma following a traffic accident and arriving at Tenmasou Inn in the picturesque seaside town of Mitsuse. As is explained to her, the inn exists in a liminal space between Heaven and Earth where those caught between life and death are expected to make a choice on their direction of travel. 

But Tamae begins to enjoy her time at Tenmasou in part after learning that the owner’s daughters, Nozomi (Yuko Oshima) and Kanae (Mugi Kadowaki), are her half-sisters. They are fully aware of their liminal status and that unlike Tamae they can never return to the mortal world or make any kind of life for themselves in Mitsuse where time stands still. Nevertheless, Tamae’s relentless cheerfulness and knack for human empathy prove key assets, beginning to return an energy and warmth that has those around her giving new thought to their cosmic inertia and if it’s really possible to go on living in a constant state of timelessness. 

Tamae might want to stay, experiencing for the first time the sense of family that she’s searched for all her life. She considers giving up the rest of her time to stay with them, but is reminded that no one can stay in this transient place forever while this version of Mitsuse which seems to hang over the “real life” town may soon disappear. Those who live there describe it as like living in a dream, a confusing simulacrum of life in which no time passes. There are those who make the eventual decision to pass on towards rebirth while others opt to stay, still having unfinished business or perhaps just not quite yet ready. 

Recalling the 2011 tsunami, the film touches on the difficult subject of survivor’s guilt and how to come to terms with loss on a mass scale while Tamae tries to process what it means to live and to not to. She resolves that “people don’t end when they die” but live on in the memories of those who remember them, though her conviction that she must live on as a kind of conduit for the souls of others may also rob her of a degree of her selfhood in her own right to live simply as herself.

Even so as she admits life is hard. An old woman suffering with liver cancer who had been blind for many years looks for beauty in the afterlife only to be reminded that there are beautiful things everywhere if you take the time to look. She too has had a life of sadness, but discovers that it might not be too late to make up for lost time, while a very young woman who felt herself to be alone learns that she has a friend and there are those who care for her even she did nearly burn the inn down in a fit of temper. Unabashedly sentimental, the film is as much about moving on as it is about learning to live in the present as the various guests contemplate whether to return to the world of the living with all of its pain and loneliness, or proceed to that of the dead knowing that there’s no guarantee the next life will be any better. Melancholy but also in its way uplifting, Kitamura’s empathetic drama eventually settles on a note of poignancy in which the act of living becomes its own memorial and defiant act of remembrance in the face of constant and unexpected loss.

The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn screens in New York Aug. 6 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Space Travelers (スペーストラベラーズ, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2000)

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“What are you doing now?” asks a very zeitgeisty set of onscreen titles at the beginning of Katsuyuki Motohiro’s millennial heist comedy, Space Travelers (スペーストラベラーズ). Both hopeful and not, Motoyuki’s cosmic farce takes the sense of anxiety and despair which colour other similarly themed turn of the century movies and turns them into a source of possibility while simultaneously implying that for some paradise may always be out of reach or else relegated to a state of mind. After all, “reality is different from animation”.

The idea of a far off paradise is what drives a trio of orphans (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Masanobu Ando, and Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) to consider armed robbery, planning the slick kind of heist they’ve seen in the movies in which they run into off into the sunset with a bag full of cash after holding a bank to ransom. Of course, it doesn’t quite go to plan leaving the three essentially good-hearted guys with a problem because they weren’t really prepared to harm anyone (two of their three weapons are duds) and they don’t have a plan B. What happens then is somewhat unexpected as a degree of camaraderie begins to arise between the would-be-thieves and the small number of customers and employees trapped in the foyer who then become something of an artificial team trying to overcome the rapidly escalating situation as the police surround the building in the incorrect assumption that the robbery is connected to terrorist action. 

What soon becomes apparent is that for the trio the heist is part wish fulfilment fantasy and a last ditch attempt to catapult themselves out of a sense of impossible despair. As they are all orphans, they feel a deeper sense of disconnection from a society which has in itself abandoned them, partly as it turns out hoping to find their long-lost parents in a tropical island paradise known to them only from a faded postcard. For the customers and employees, the robbery is the most exciting thing to happen to them in their entire lives and the proximity to mortal danger soon forces them to wrestle with their personal dissatisfaction. Before the heist took place, bank clerk Midori (Eri Fukatsu) had been planning to attend a party to celebrate her engagement to another employee branded a sleazy creep by most of the other female members of staff with whom he had apparently tried it on on previous occasions. She had agreed to marry him despite her reservations because he had sworn to lay down his life for her if she were ever in danger only to spot him trying to escape on his own via the air conditioning ducts. Being caught up in this bizarre situation forces her to accept she had been leading a “conveyor belt life” out of fear, always picking the safe option rather than take a risk chasing personal happiness even picking a husband solely because he promised her protection. 

In the Japan of the 2000s, chasing personal happiness might have seemed like a fools errand trapped in a stagnant economy with no prospect of improvement and only increased risk if you fall from one particular rung on the ladder. Yet the conclusion Midori seems to come to is that the only way of rebelling against this sense of nihilistic frustration is to take the risk and look for the paradise that is waiting for her rather than settle for a disappointing status quo. She learns this partly through her connection with one of the bank robbers who casts each of the hostages as members of his favourite, now cancelled, anime “Space Travelers” created according to an onscreen interview to offer a sense of something tangible to an increasingly disconnected youth that would allow them to experience a full range of emotions (the animated sequences created for the film were later spun off into an OVA of their own). Through their accidental role playing, the hostages each discover the sides of themselves they’d been missing to claim their true identities, Midori learning that she can protect herself, nerdy clerk Shimizu (Masahiro Komoto) overcoming his crippling shyness, a middle-aged electrician flummoxed by modern technology proving that his skills aren’t obsolete, and a feuding couple on the brink of divorce reflecting that they actually do work well as a team. 

Even so, not everyone comes out of the situation with new hope for the future with the implication being that some gambles are simply too big or that for some paradise will always lie just out of reach even if Midori remains committed to seeking it out on her own whether she eventually finds it or not. Meanwhile, Motohiro takes potshots at the media reality of the day as a cynical boyband publicity stunt to announce their breakup tour to rake in more cash before announcing a comeback is derailed by the press tripping over themselves to get to the unfolding bank hostage crisis with the police also doing their bit to hog the media spotlight while mistakenly believing a suspicious-looking man who actually is a fugitive terrorist is responsible for the heist. With the world as messed up as it clearly is, the film seems to say, chasing paradise is the least risky thing of all. 

Trailers (no subtitles)