Tag: Anshul Chauhan

December (赦し, Anshul Chauhan, 2022)

April 7, 2023by Hayley Scanlon

Where is the line between justice and vengeance? The grieving father at the centre of Anshul Chauhan’s December (赦し, Yurushi) is determined that the teenage girl who stabbed his daughter to death should never leave prison, but what he wants is a kind of equivalent exchange in that the person who stole his future along with his child’s should have no right to one herself. A more mainstream effort than either of his previous films Bad Poetry Tokyo and Kontora each of which dealt with similarly thorny themes, Chauhan’s unusually tense courtroom drama is the latest to put the legal system on trial while asking difficult questions about grief, guilt, and what exactly it is we mean when we talk about “justice”.

Seven years previously, 17-year-old Kana (Ryo Matsuura) stabbed her classmate Emi (Kanon Narumi) multiple times in a frenzied attack that resulted in her death. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison and has never attempted to deny her crime. It isn’t she who has asked for her sentence to be reviewed but an independent lawyer, Sato (Toru Kizu), who claims he’s doing it for “justice” though as Kana points out might have half an eye on compensation money she’d be able to claim for wrongful imprisonment if the case were successful. Sato seems to think it will be on the grounds that Kana was unfairly tried as an adult, mitigating circumstances were never brought to the defence’s attention, and the judge’s sentencing was swayed by personal feeling placing it outside of conventional guidelines that should be applied in cases like these.

For Emi’s parents, Katsu (Shogen) and Sumiko (Megumi), the appeal is a slap in the face. The couple have separated and while Sumiko has attempted to move on with her life, marrying a man she met in a support group for bereaved parents, Katsu has become a bitter alcoholic living a purgatorial existence of almost total inertia. Outraged, he is determined to make sure that Kana never leaves prison and is only sorry that she could not receive the death sentence because of her age, while Sumiko would rather not be involved at all, uncertain that she would be able to endure the emotionally draining process of another court case. They settle on presenting a united front, but discover that to do so is also to put themselves on trial while being confronted by a past neither has ever really faced.

The strain on Sumiko is evident as she walks along along a bridge at night and peers over the edge as if about to jump. She later learns that Kana had a mother too who did in fact take her own life after selling everything she owned to pay the compensation money that is used against them in court to imply that they’ve already been served “justice” in the form of monetary recompense from the defendant’s family which ought to declare the matter closed. Unlike Katsu, Sumiko had said her goal wasn’t vengeance but only to make sure that no other mother suffers as she has done, yet another mother already has for she lost a daughter too. Kana meanwhile has no one left to turn to even if she were released, she will have to make a new life for herself alone. Kana is herself victimised by an unforgiving society, the subtext suggesting that she was bullied for being the daughter of a single mother who was unable to fully care for her or provide the kind of material comfort children like Emi receive. The “happy family home” Katsu accuses her of destroying is also a symbol of everything Kana was denied but she did not kill out of jealousy or resentment only, ironically, to escape a kind of imprisonment and free herself of an oppressive bully.

Katsu says he’d kill her himself if he had the chance, but as Sumiko points out then he’d just end up in prison for the rest of his life with only his “righteousness” to comfort him. How could he claim to be any better? As Sato says, emotion has no place in a court of law. That’s why the law the exists and we mediate “justice” through a dispassionate third party to ensure the sentence is fair and not merely “vengeance”. Katsu certainly sees himself as a righteous man. In a repeated motif, Chauhan shows him taking the long way round by walking on the pathways of the grid-like forecourt leading to the courthouse while others hurriedly take the direct route crossing the squares at a diagonal angle. For him the answer is only ever black and white and he is very certain of his truths, but also blinded by his pain and unable to see that his desire for vengeance is more for himself than it is for Emi.

Only by accepting a painful truth can he begin to move past his grief, despite himself moved by Kana’s quiet dignity in which she admits her responsibility and suggests that she will never really be “free” even if she is released. What she offers, in her way, is peace allowing the bereaved parents to bring an end to their ordeal or least enter a new phase in their grief which allows them to move forward in memory rather than remaining trapped within the unresolved past. Perhaps in the end that’s what we mean by “justice”, a just peace with no more recrimination only sorrow and regret with renewed possibility for the future.

December screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Kontora (コントラ, Anshul Chauhan, 2019)

March 9, 2020by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

Life is a series of oppositions, the past conflicting with the future, the young with the old, selfishness with altruism, but without conflict there can be no sense of forward motion. That’s largely where the heroine of Anshul Chauhan’s second feature Kontora (コントラ) has found herself, stuck in a “one horse” town with no sense of excitement, longing for the bright lights of Tokyo while fiercely rejecting her distant father in favour of gentle companionship with her compassionate grandad. It’s not until after he passes away, however, that she begins to realise there were things in his life that he was never able to tell her.

Teenager Sora (Wan Marui), in her final year of high school, discovers this on finding her grandfather’s body. Understandably panicked she looks over the box of World War Two mementos he appeared to have been poring over just before died and hurriedly hides them so her father (Takuzo Shimizu) won’t see. After the funeral she finds herself fondling his old pilot’s helmet and goggles while reading his war diary, filled with beautifully drawn illustrations and terrible memories of torture and privation. Writing such a diary must have been quite a risk, seeing as Sora’s grandfather recounts only fear and dissatisfaction, envious of the young men who failed the draft and got to continue with their student lives while he is lonely and desperate but claims no longer to be able to understand love. For Sora, however, the most important thing is that her grandfather mentions burying his “metal arm” in the forest. She commits herself to finding it, bunking off school to go digging on a nearby mountain.

Meanwhile, she also begins spotting a strange young man (Hidemasa Mase) around town who is dressed in rags and seemingly can only walk backwards. The man enters her life in a more concrete sense when he literally collides with her father’s car while the pair are returning from a fairly disastrous family dinner over which her father’s cousin Yoshiji (Takuzo Shimizu) had made an inappropriate bid to get him to sell the family home so he could use it to house workers at his factory, even offering to give Sora a job to make sure she’s looked after. Questioned about her future plans, Sora had mentioned hoping to go to Tokyo, which comes as a shock to her dad and is abruptly shutdown by Yoshiji who can’t see what the point in that would be. His own daughter, Haru (Seira Kojima), went to Tokyo to become a dancer but seems to have returned somewhat chastened and now works in his factory, as if proving his point that there is no future for girls like Sora other than shifting straight into small-town life seconds after graduating high school.

Sora’s dad leaves the gathering drunk and angry, which is why his first thought is abandoning the injured man on the roadside so he won’t have to deal with a drunk driving charge. Sora, however, refuses to abnegate her responsibly and insists on making sure the man is OK, leading to a compromise in which they take him home to monitor overnight. Still unconvinced, Sora’s dad kicks him out in the morning, but Sora chases him down and brings him back, dressing him in grandad’s clothes and stunned when she hears him singing one of grandad’s songs.

The man’s presence highlights a key difference between Sora and her distant father. Sora is intrigued and unafraid, she tries to talk to the man and is very interested to find out why he only walks backwards but is also accepting of his silence. Her father meanwhile sees only danger. His first thoughts are only to expel the man by whatever means possible, eventually jumping to conclusions born of prejudice that he may have somehow harmed Sora. Sora, meanwhile, jealously keeps the diary to herself, never sharing her newfound quest with her father until forced into the open at which point she tells him that the diary had given her life a sense of purpose that she was reluctant to share with anyone else. Secrets revealed, the rift between father and daughter begins to heal while the mysterious man looks on in silence, perhaps knowing that grandad had other messages to give that are still waiting to be uncovered.

Strangely, no one seems to stop to consider that grandad may have buried his “metal arm” for good reason, and that it should perhaps stay that way (especially if a heartless arch capitalist like Yoshiji ends up getting his hands on it). Nevertheless, unearthing the buried past begins to solve the mystery of grandad and enable a kind of healing. The man keeps walking round and round in circles, backwards as if walking against the future, caught on a treadmill of repetitive anxieties and unable to move forward. Sora may be at that point herself, stuck in a moment of adolescent confusion unable to step into adulthood and having lost her only guide and confidant. It may be, in some ways, troubling that she finds her direction through embracing a violent past, but there is indeed a moment of healing in two eras meeting which allows time to reassume its proper flow. Ethereal and mysterious, Kontora is both coming-of-age tale and a melancholy fable of griefs both national and personal in which forward motion is possible but only in facing the past head on and waving it goodbye as you turn around to walk towards a more positive future.

Kontora screens on March 12/13 as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Bad Poetry Tokyo (東京不穏詩, Anshul Chauhan, 2018)

October 5, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Running towards a dream can help you forget whatever it was you were running away from, but there may come a time when you have to accept that your dream has betrayed you and the sun is already setting. For the heroine of Anshul Chauhan’s debut feature Bad Poetry Tokyo (東京不穏詩, Tokyo Fuon Uta) that moment has arrived all too soon and though she perhaps expected it to come and had actively resisted it, it can no longer be outrun.

30 years old, Jun’s (Shuna Iijima) dream has been a long time coming. At a make or break audition for a Canadian film, she tells the panel that she studied English at a top university in Tokyo and plans to move to LA to work in movies. Meanwhile, she blew out of her country home five years ago and has become estranged from her family. She supports herself working as a hostess in a seedy bar which is more a front for sex work than it is a drinking establishment, but sex work is work and at least pays well allowing her to save money to move to LA.

Unfortunately she plans to move there with her current boyfriend, Taka (Orson Mochizuki), who is a bouncer at the club and was responsible for getting her the job in the first place even if he now can’t quite reconcile himself with the feelings of jealousy and resentment her work causes him. Taka also has issues of his own and when twin crises present themselves in the form of a possessive and intimidating client, and a home invasion that seems like an inside job and leaves her with visible facial scarring, Jun is finally robbed of all hope and left with no other option than to retreat to her hometown and the quiet horrors which have been patiently waiting for her return.

Jun’s life, it would seem, has been one long scream. Returning to a seemingly empty home, she is less than happy to find her slumbering father (Kohei Mashiba) slumped over in the living room. Noticing the wounds on her face he begins to ask her what happened but more out of irritation than concern – he warns her not to bring any trouble to his door. Jun mutters that it might have been a mistake to come back, to which her father cooly retorts that the biggest mistake was her birth, resenting his daughter for her very existence and the taboo desires she arouses in him while insisting that this is all her fault because she is essentially “bad”. Jun’s dad didn’t even bother to tell her that her mother had died, perhaps out of embarrassment or shame for this was not a natural death and though not at his hand he is very much to blame. The first of many men to have wronged her, only now in her somewhat weakened and desperate state is Jun finally ready for a reckoning. After all, there is nothing more to lose.

Men have indeed ruined her life, as has the oppressive patriarchy which continues to define it. The first time we see her, Jun is forced to perform an intense audition scene of a woman being brutally beaten and abused for a dispassionate director. Which is to say, she is forced to humiliate herself and relive very real traumas in the quest to fulfil her dream. This early scene of playacting will be recalled several times, most obviously in the flashforward which opens the film and eventually leads to a moment of both liberation and transgression which ultimately seals her fate.

Unable to gain a foothold in acting, Jun is forced into a life of sex work which she finds degrading and unpleasant, allowing herself to be “violated” in return for money as she later describes it. Again reliving past traumas, her anger only grows and intensifies as she passively permits herself to be misused. A final act of rebellion in refusing the intimidating and entitled attentions of a controlling client leads to a dangerous situation in which he reminds her that women like her belong to men like him and if it pleases him he will destroy her. Jun gives up on her dream and therefore has no more need of the club, but employment in a hostess bar is not always as casual as it seems and one cannot just simply leave. Once again Jun has become someone’s property, not merely as an idea but as flesh.

Jun’s physical wounds are a manifestation of her emotional trauma and the legacy of violence which traps her in an oppressive cycle of abuse and despair. Back in her hometown, filled as it is with unpleasant memories and the shadow of her father’s cruelty, Jun is haunted by the spectre of an innocent childhood. Reuniting with an old friend who, it seems, has always carried a torch for the girl she once was, Jun is forced to confront the gulf between the “innocent” self which escaped with hope, and the defeated self which has returned with none. Even this seemingly positive, innocent romance is eventually tainted by violence offered as an act of love which has its own sense of disquieting poetry. Yet violence is the force which perpetuates despair, creating only fear and rage and pain each time it breeds. Jun is running once again but neither forward nor back, only full pelt towards the setting sun.

Bad Poetry Tokyo was screened as part of the 2018 Raindance Film Festival.

Festival promo (English subtitles)