Tag: Bengal

Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖, Shunichi Nagasaki, 1991)

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Driving through the city by night, a young woman finds herself plagued by a mysterious force while struggling to break out of her self-imposed inertia in Shunichi Nagasaki’s moody thriller, Stranger (夜のストレンジャー 恐怖). The film’s Japanese title, “night stranger terror”, perhaps more clearly hints at a sense of urban threat while surrounded by so many unfamiliar people, yet it is in many ways Kiriko’s (Yuko Natori) mistrust and suspicion that isolates her from the surrounding society and keeps her trapped in a kind of limbo unable to escape her past.

It might be tempting to read her aloofness as a direct consequence of her experiences, but in an early scene when she was still a bank employee we hear a colleague criticise her for being “anti-social” while Kiriko’s rejection of her seems born more of contempt than shyness or a preference for solitude. Working as a cashier at the bank at the tail end of the bubble is a pretty good job, especially given the still prevailing sexism of the working environment, that positions Kiriko firmly within an aspirant middle-class. She still lives at home surrounded by her family, but is in a relationship with a man who pressures her for money to invest in the stock market. She begins embezzling and lives as if there’s no tomorrow, splashing out on fancy sunglasses before meeting her boyfriend having left work early feigning illness. Unfortunately for her, she gets caught and her boyfriend predictably abandons her.

Just like the asset bubble, her life implodes and plunges her into a lower social stratum as a woman with a criminal conviction for financial impropriety and a hefty debt in needing to pay back the money she stole from the bank for her ex’s harebrained stock speculation schemes. All in all, you could say she’s been betrayed by economic forces, but also as she later admits, but her own uncertain desires in being wilfully deceived by Akiyama (Takashi Naito) and making a clear choice to defraud the bank. She realises that it might not have been a desire to please Akiyama that led her to do it, but the illicit thrill she felt in tapping away on her keyboard stealing the money and otherwise being in a position of economic power over a man, buying him things and taking him out for fancy food. Her sense of malaise is only deepened when she meets Akiyama by chance and tries to tell him all this, but he isn’t really interested. He seems to have moved on and planning to marry another woman. 

Kiriko tries to look at his hands to see if he has burn scars like the man who attacked her in her taxi, but he doesn’t. Perhaps there was a small part of her that wanted it to be him. At least if it was, it would mean he still felt something for her, which would also prove that he ever did. And it would make sense, which is less frightening than her stalker just being a nutty fare, another irate man with a nondescript grudge wandering the city. Taxi driver is one of the few jobs open to her with a criminal record, but it’s also an unusual profession for a woman which further isolates her in her working environment. Her boss keeps calling her “little lady,” while patronisingly offering to put her on the day shift because it’s less dangerous. Kijima (Kentaro Shimizu), an obnoxious colleague, picks at Kiriko for thinking everyone who strikes up a conversation must be sexually interested in her. But the truth is that they are and like Kijima demand her attention. When they don’t get it they’re pissed off. The cab is perhaps the place she feels the most safe, though she faces her fair share of weird fares from drunk men trying to flirt to religious maniacs proselytising from the back seat. 

Now living alone in an apartment, her aloofness is both a personal preference and means of punishing herself. When her brother calls, he encourages her to come home but she says she can’t even though she wants to because she hasn’t yet dealt with her past or taken steps towards being able to forgive herself. She tells Kijima, who in truth behaves in an incredibly creepy way that suggests she’s right to avoid him, that she wonders if she isn’t the only one who can see the mysterious Land Cruiser, as if she were really imagining it. The Land Cruiser does indeed come to stand in for the buried past by which Kiriko is haunted and her eventual besting of it is a symbolic act that suggests she’s finally managed to overcome her guilt and shame to be able to leave the past behind.

As she told Kijima, this was something only she could do by her own hand or none. Akiyama’s dismissiveness of her reflects the fact that he couldn’t give her this absolution either, she needed to find it for herself. Kijima accused her of still being hung up on the guy that scammed her, but that wasn’t quite it. The resolution might hint at his being right when he told her that she needed to learn to trust people more in that it seems to lead to a greater willingness to open herself up to the world. Once again, her sunglasses get broken as a new truth becomes visible to her. A lonely little boy she meets who, like her, enjoys driving in circles and going nowhere, probes her lack of human connection by suggesting that she doesn’t know what it’s like to love someone which is why she can’t understand his obviously inappropriate love for her, though it’s a fact that Kiriko has to acknowledge is truth in interrogating the reality of her relationship with Akiyama.

Nevertheless, in the end, she saves herself and embraces her solitude and independence looking out at the peaceful bay in a city that no longer seems so threatening even if the unseen threat in this case did turn out to be random and have no rational explanation. Nagasaki never again worked in the realms of V-Cinema and his entry is fairly atypical in starring an older, established actress as an action lead while requiring no nudity or sexual content, instead quite literally allowing her to grab the wheel and take control of her life to claim freedom and independence rather than solely romantic fulfilment.

Sato and Sato (佐藤さんと佐藤さん, Chihiro Amano, 2025)

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Aged 37 and recently divorced herself, lawyer Sachi (Yukino Kishii) listens to a man whose wife has evidently left him complain that what really soured him on her was that there was a dead bug in their living room that remained in the same spot for months on end, which indicated to him that his wife only ever swept the room as if it were round, literally cutting corners in their married life. He also complains that she only ever fed the children ready meals for dinner and they only ever had toast for breakfast. “I mean, would anyone call that a woman?” he rolls his eyes and sighs, expecting instant support from his legal team. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that he could simply have swept up himself or sorted breakfast and dinner, though he now brands his wife an unfit mother and seeks full custody, perhaps only as a means of hurting her or vindicating himself.

It’s this patriarchal take on the division labour that comes under the microscope in Chihiro Amano’s profoundly moving marital drama, Sato and Sato (佐藤さんと佐藤さん, Sato-san to Santo-san). Following the gradual disintegration of a relationship under the pressures of contemporary married life along with changing notions of gender roles, toxic masculinity, and the ways in which men and women navigate the domestic environment, the film seems to ask why it is that there isn’t more equality across the board, with practical and emotional responsibilities for the home still disproportionately falling on one partner.

This is all is more obvious when Tamotsu (Hio Miyazawa) ends up becoming an accidental househusband after repeated failures to pass the bar exam. He and Sachi, who share a surname which is also the most common in Japan making them a pair of everypersons, met as members of the university coffee club and, in truth, seemed somewhat mismatched from the start. She just bought the deal of the day and had the beans ground there. He’s carefully researched the best on offer and had the beans roasted to perfection with the intention of grading them on the day for the best flavour. Depending on how you see it, perhaps they complement each other and round out the corners to become one whole, but, on the other hand, maybe they aspire to different things. Nevertheless, they become a happy young couple full of hope and expectation for the future. But their relationship is soured by Tamotsu’s failures, and only more so when Sachi says she’ll study for the bar with him only to end up passing herself when he again yet fails.

Of course, it’s embarrassing for Tamotsu on a personal level that he can’t pass the exam, especially when he’s so told so many people that he’s going to be a lawyer. He’s been putting everything else on hold, including his relationship with Sachi having put off meeting her parents until he’s passed out of fear he’ll disappoint them. The sense of inadequacy begins to eat away at him, especially after Sachi begins working as a lawyer and is taking care of most of their bills. The other men we meet in the film, especially Sugai who is being divorced by his wife of 50 years, stress their position as a provider, as if that were all they needed to do in order to fulfil their role and buy their wife’s devotion. But Mrs Sugai, who now refuses to see him, states only in a letter that living with him is unbearable and he all he ever did was shout at her so there’s no prospect of communication. Tamotsu too is further driven into despair by the thought that others see him as “unmanly” because he’s being supported by his partner, though in reality masculinity is a performance for other men and not really something most women care about. What begins to bother Sachi is not his failure, but that she feels as if he’s given up and is not really contributing to their relationship or seriously studying to pass the exam. 

On a visit back to his hometown due his grandmother’s health crisis, starts to bond with a local woman and almost forgotten childhood friend who has herself escaped an abusive marriage but lost her children to her in-laws. He sees in her a more idealised kind of traditional wife, but after conplimenting him that his wife must be very lucky as he helps clear up at the bar where she works while all his friends doze off drunkenly, she gives him a rude awakening. He’s just like the others after all. He wants comfort, which is to say emotional labour from her, a woman he doesn’t really know, and the absolution sought by every man who says his wife doesn’t understand him. He wants to be told that he’s right and good, even while he blames Sachi and his domestic responsibilities for his inability to pass the bar. While talking with his old friends and hearing that his ageing father is planning to close their family farm, he starts to think about moving back and starting some sort of non-profit but as Sachi says when he puts it to her rather abruptly, he’s not really serious. Even if this sort of life might really suit him better, it’s not a decision he’s made after coming to the realisation that the bar exam is beyond him, but an attempt to run away not only from his failure but his domestic responsibilities. 

But by the same token, even while the roles are reversed Sachi falls into many of the same traps as an insensitive husband. So busy with her own working life, she doesn’t really see things from Tamotsu’s perspective and is only irritated by what she sees as his failure to commit to one thing or another. He is annoyed when she does things like point out there’s no toilet paper or contemplates buying a washing machine to make his life easier, because really he doesn’t think these things should be his responsibility and suggesting they are makes him feel like less of a man. They can’t orient themselves around the idea of a marriage as a domestic partnership in which they split both domestic and external labour equally and are each responsible for the whole. 

But then again, perhaps society isn’t ready for that either. Though Tamotsu does actually take care of the home environment and is the main caregiver for their son, Fuku, others still look to Sachi where a child is concerned. When they’re called into school because Fuku has apparently seriously injured another child in a squabble over building blocks, Tamotsu wants to ask more questions about how this happened, but Sachi immediately takes over and reassures the teachers she’ll make the necessary apologies to the other family, whispering in private that they’re all too busy to string this out which may not, of course, be very helpful in terms of Fuku’s further development. Conversely, when the pair are picked up by police after a violent argument in the street, the officer insists he has to write down “unemployed” even if Tamotsu says he’s a househusband, while when Sachi replies “lawyer” he assumes she’s trying to assert her right to legal representation and chuckles that she’s not under arrest so it isn’t necessary. She has to show him her lawyer’s pin to explain, and even then he just stares at them dumbfounded by their usual family setup. 

Sachi’s friend Shino who consults her for divorce advice when her husband cheats on her, reflects that Sachi might have had it easy in one sense because she never needed to change her name and accommodate herself with the loss of identity that comes with being called “Mrs Hasegawa” or “Miki’s mum” rather than by her birth name which admittedly was passed down from a father rather than a husband. For Shino taking back her maiden name was more important than a divorce in allowing her to reclaim herself as an individual who has choices and agency and isn’t someone who exists only in relation to a man in her social role as wife and mother. The film suggests the reason the marriage is unsustainable is precisely because society doesn’t accept it as a partnership of equals, so even when Tamotsu finally passes the bar, they end up with what’s perceived as two husbands and no one taking care of the domestic space to which the only solution is two households. With profound empathy for each, the film takes care not to apportion any blame, except perhaps on the parade of useless husbands being sued for divorce while unable to understand why their wives have left them or accept any responsibility for the failure of the marriage, but sees only the sadness of romantic failure and the impossibility of an uncompromised happiness in an otherwise oppressive society.

Sato and Sato screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Iwane: Sword of Serenity (居眠り磐音, Katsuhide Motoki, 2019)

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The contradictions of the samurai code conspire against one noble-hearted young man in Katsuhide Motoki’s adaptation of the long running series of historical novels by Saeki Yasuhide, Iwane: Sword of Serenity (居眠り磐音, Inemuri Iwane). Yet this truly serene samurai is a stoical sort, learning to bear his pain with fortitude while standing up for justice in an increasingly corrupt Edo where money rules all while an ascendent merchant class continues to challenge the fiercely hierarchical social order. 

Beginning in 1772 which turned out to be a disastrous year, the tale opens as hero Iwane (Tori Matsuzaka) prepares to return home after completing his three year rotation in Edo in the company of childhood friends Kinpei (Tasuku Emoto) and Shinnosuke (Yosuke Sugino). Shinnosuke is in fact married to Kinpei’s sister Mai, while Iwane will himself be married to Kinpei’s other sister Nao immediately on his return so close are they. As Iwane’s father tells him, there are great hopes for these young men that they can “turn our outdated clan around”, but events will conspire against them. Spoiling the happy homecoming, Shinnosuke is accosted by a drunken uncle who convinces him Mai has been unfaithful in his absence with the consequence that he kills her immediately on his return home. Unable to understand this turn of events, Kinpei confronts his friend but eventually kills him, while Iwane is then forced to kill Kinpei after he goes on murderous rampage in revenge for the wrong done to his sister. 

In trying to mediate the case, the argument is put forward that Shinnosuke acted rashly and should have brought his suspicion to the authorities rather than opting for summary execution. The lord however disagrees, condoning Shinnosuke’s actions under the rationale that to do so would have been considered “weak minded” while as Shinnosuke himself had claimed he acted in accordance with the samurai code in which female adultery is illegal and punishable by death. By contrast, he finds Kinpei’s rashness offensive, insisting that he also should have recognised the legitimacy of his sister’s murder and simply left quietly with her body. Having learned the truth in which his childhood friends became victims of clan intrigue, romantic jealousy, and tragic misunderstandings in this Othello-like plot, Shinnosuke and childhood sweetheart Nao are also consumed by the rashness of samurai law each exiled from their clan and cast adrift in Edo-era society. 

Edo-era society is however also itself corrupt. Some months later, Iwane has returned to Edo as a lowly ronin lodging with a kindly old man, Kinbei, who helps him find a job firstly gutting eel then as a bodyguard at a money exchange which has been receiving anonymous threats they assume are from rival broker Awaya who has hatched a nefarious plan to manipulate the currency market to stop the current Shogun introducing a new unit which can be used in both Edo and Kyoto which would understandably cut into his already corrupt business model. Luckily, Imazuya is an honourable man who backs the new currency plan and wants to do the right thing which makes him a perfect fit for Iwane’s innate sense of justice. “You don’t know the way of the merchant” Awaya snaps at him, suggesting both that the samurai are already on their way down as the merchants rise and that his unwillingness to play dirty will be his downfall. Nevertheless, Iwane is the type to adapt quickly, instantly coming up with a way to play Awaya at his own game and kick his destructive amoral capitalism to the curb. 

Meanwhile, he continues to pine for Nao while drawing closer to Kinbei’s earnest daughter Okon (Fumino Kimura). As we discover Nao is also a victim of an intensely patriarchal social order but through the tragedy that befalls them also finds strength and agency making a life changing decision that allows her to become independent while looking after her family if in the knowledge that the childhood romance she shared with Iwane is a thing of the past. Iwane too agrees that he is trapped in a living hell of guilt and grief, yet choosing to go on living anyway as calm and cheerful as he’d ever been while standing up to Edo-era corruption though uncomfortably enough this time against the destabilising influence of the rising merchant class and therefore in contrast to most jidaigeki reinforcing the legitimacy of the samurai order which has paradoxically also ruined his life with its rigid and implacable social codes. In any case, Motoki’s classic chanbara melodrama has a serenity of its own as the cheerfully laidback hero resolves to live his life by a code of his own free of samurai constraint. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

Tsuyukusa (ツユクサ, Hideyuki Hirayama, 2022)

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A middle-aged woman decides to embrace possibility after her car is hit by a meteorite in Hideyuki Hirayama’s charmingly quirky dramedy, Tsuyukusa (ツユクサ). Though dealing with difficult subjects such as grief, depression, alcoholism, and loneliness, a spirit of warmth and generosity shines through in the quiet seaside town as its various inhabitants each in their own way find themselves pondering new beginnings and while discovering that change may be scary it’s worth taking the risk for greater happiness. 

49-year-old Fumi (Satomi Kobayashi) lives in a quiet village by the sea and works in a textile factory where the atmosphere is laidback and collaborative. For poignant reasons only later disclosed she’s formed a close relationship with her friend’s son Kohei (Taiyo Saito) who is obsessed with all things space. It’s Kohei who decides that whatever it was that hit her car while she was driving home one evening was probably a meteorite and declares that Fumi must be one very lucky lady because the chances of witnessing a meteorite strike are all but infinitesimal. Fumi too seems to take it as a good omen, wearing the moon rock that Kohei finds at the beach as a pendant and symbol of the new possibilities in her life. 

Meanwhile it seems clear that Fumi is dealing with a series of things including a problem with alcohol which is why she’s been attending a local support group which is surprisingly large given the size of the town. Then again she’s not the only one dealing with crisis, her two friends from the factory are also at a point of transition. Kohei’s mother Nao (Kami Hiraiwa) is at odds with her husband (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) who has accepted a job offer in another town but suggests that she and Kohei stay behind in part because he is the boy’s stepfather and worries about uprooting him especially as Kohei does not seem to have fully accepted him as a father. Taeko (Noriko Eguchi) meanwhile has embarked on a secret affair with a Buddhist monk (rakugo performer Tougetsuanhakusyu) she somewhat transgressively met when he read the sutras at her late husband’s funeral. Fumi is gradually warming up to new love of her own in taking a liking to Goro (Yutaka Matsushige), a melancholy gentleman of around her own age whom she often sees sadly blowing the tsuyukusa leaves like a harmonica in the local park. 

The village is for them a gentle space of healing, many coming from the city following some kind of emotional trauma and looking for a quiet place to escape their sorrow. Even Kohei is caught at a point of transition, exclaiming that all the adults he knows are liars while attempting to deal with his first real heartbreak and contemplating moving away from all his friends and the town he grew up in with a man he doesn’t quite feel he knows. But then as Goro points out, the tsuyukusa grow everywhere and happiness is always in reach as long as you decide to go out and fetch it. Fumi may originally over invest in the symbolism of the moon rock, as if being hit by a meteorite really was an omen of change and a kind of good luck charm in itself rather than a funny thing that happened and caused her to reevaluate her life but finally realises that she didn’t need a meteor strike to give her permission to be happy. 

Even so the quirky seaside town does seem to be a cheerful place with a series of colourful characters even if many of them are lonely or displaced. Fumi’s boss is forever doing tai chi by the beach after apparently being left by his wife and unsuccessfully travelling to Taiwan in search of a new one. The guy who runs the local bar used to be a whaler and sends customers out on errands on his behalf, while the old man who runs the alcohol support group finds his job so stressful that it’s driving him to drink. “Just fix the pain, please. Then I can keep on going” Fumi tells a dentist though it’s a fairly apt metaphor for life. Reminiscent of the work of Naoko Ogigami of which Satomi Kobayashi is perhaps a representative star, Tsuyukusa never shies away from the darker corners of life but nevertheless allows its warmhearted protagonist to rediscover joy if only in the simple things. 

Tsuyukusa screened as part of this year’s Five Flavours Film Festival and is available to stream in Poland until 4th December.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Happy Flight (ハッピーフライト, Shinobu Yaguchi, 2008)

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“We’re part of a whole system” the chief mechanic insists with exasperation, irritated with an employee being too thorough, “what if this delays departure?”. Best known for ensemble comedies, of which Happy Flight (ハッピーフライト) is one, Shinobu Yaguchi had originally envisaged a disaster movie only to change tack realising that aircraft accidents really are (thankfully) extremely rare and the backstage workings of an airport might well lead themselves to comedy. Even so, it’s perhaps surprising that sponsor airline ANA who were apparently heavily involved in the project allowed themselves to be seen in a less than perfect light even if their pilots and ground staff do indeed save the day when potential disaster strikes. 

Like any good farce, Yaguchi throws just about every potential problem into one basket beginning with the fact that this flight to Honolulu is the final exam for co-pilot Suzuki (Seiichi Tanabe) who is hoping to earn a promotion to captain though a disastrous performance in the simulator may have dimmed his expectations. It’s also the first flight for chirpy air hostess Etsuko (Haruka Ayase) still harbouring some delusions about the glamour of the flight attendant life while the plane itself is late in and technically speaking needs a couple of repairs though the airline is already a little jumpy about the number of delays impacting their services recently and the chief mechanic thinks some of them can wait. A junior engineer takes it on himself to change a part and incurs the wrath of his boss for taking to long, but is perhaps privately worried he didn’t do it properly and later alarmed when the plane runs into trouble worried that his missing wrench might be the cause. Aside from the pressing typhoon, the other problem is a flock of annoying seagulls normally taken care of by an old man nicknamed “bird guy” who warns them off with a shotgun only today he’s been accosted by the “bird lovers alliance”, while the airport is also surrounded by a bunch of obsessive aviation enthusiasts recording every detail and uploading them online. 

If something can go wrong then it will, as it does when the backup sensors stop working leaving the pilots flying blind, but even before that consumer aviation is first and foremost a customer facing business with the airline concentrating on ensuring that passengers have a good experience so they don’t lose their business to a rival. That’s one reason they’re so paranoid about avoiding delays, but also find themselves dealing with aggressive passengers each intent on receiving individual attention forgetting for a moment that the plane is full of other people who also have needs and demands. Still learning the ropes, Etsuko struggles to understand her place in the machine only to redeem herself later through a little lateral thinking following a culinary disaster while becoming quietly disillusioned with the unexpectedly stressful side of her otherwise glamorous profession. Meanwhile stern purser Reiko (Shinobu Terajima) gives them all a masterclass in deescalating an entitled customer’s rage by stroking his ego with some well-placed psychology. 

This being a comedy it all turns out alright in the end even if Suzuki has undergone something of a baptism of fire and Etsuko has had her eyes opened to the reality of the flight attendant life. Despite everything going wrong at the same time, it goes right when it needs to thanks to the teamwork and dedication of the disparate team from the guys in the air control weather department to the scrambling ground staff arranging meals and accommodation for passengers unable to reach their destination. There’s even the hint of a happy ending for check in supervisor Natsumi (Tomoko Tabata) who was dead set on quitting her job because it doesn’t afford her any opportunities to meet nice guys, while what it does seem to largely contain is fending off the three teenage aeroplane enthusiasts who hang out in arrivals and dealing with various passenger crises. They are indeed all part of whole system, and that’s good and bad in that they all feel under pressure to get planes in the air on time which perhaps encourages them to overvalue efficiency at the cost of safety, but also makes it easier to spring into action in order to fend off a crisis should one occur so that everyone can have a “happy flight” blissfully ignorant of the minor panic under the bonnet of this not so well oiled machine. 

Happy Flight streams until 27th February in several territories as part of Japanese Film Festival Online 2022.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Kekkon Annai Mystery (結婚案内ミステリー, Yoshikuni Matsunaga, 1985)

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Selected via a talent competition held in conjunction with the search for a new actress to play the leading role in Kosei Saito’s Ninja Wars, Noriko Watanabe became the second of the new “Sannin Musume” alongside the future star of The Little Girl Who Conquered Time, Tomoyo Harada, and Kadokawa’s top idol Hiroko Yakushimaru. Her career with the studio was however comparatively short-lived affording her only three leading roles before she eventually left the agency and went independent after turning down a lead in Koibitotachi no Jikoku because of its explicit nude scenes. Again adapted from a novel by Jiro Akagawa, Kekkon Annai Mystery (結婚案内ミステリー) was her final leading performance as a Kadokawa idol (though she would also play a supporting role in Obayashi’s His Motorbike, Her Island) and saw her playing a slightly more mature role as a young woman working for a matchmaking agency who finds herself mixed up in a country house mystery after accepting an unusual proposal from a client. 

At 19, Hiroko (Noriko Watanabe) is the sole employee at the Fukada Marriage Consultation Agency owned and operated by her boss Mr. Fukada (Bengal). As we first meet her she’s deep undercover at a rival firm which has already shifted into a new era of computer-assisted matchmaking whereas Mr Fukada prefers to do things the old-fashioned way which is presumably why he has no business. It comes as something of a shock therefore when he receives a call from Mrs. Sekine (Aiko Nagayama), the temporary CEO of a major company who apparently wants to find a match for her son Masakazu (Ken Watanabe) who is shortly to return after graduating from Harvard in order to take over the family business following the death of his father six months previously. At the initial consultation, however, Mrs Sekine scandalises Mr Fukada by immediately selecting Hiroko as a potential bride. Seeing as it’s only an initial meeting, which would earn them a bonus payment, Hiroko agrees but when they drive out to the Sekines’ creepy gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere they discover all is not quite as it seems. Masakazu has a fiancée already, but unfortunately she was involved in a traffic accident and is currently in hospital which is a problem because for undisclosed reasons they need to hold the wedding right away. Hiroko is to act as a proxy seeing as no-one who’ll be coming to the ceremony has met Masakazu’s girlfriend and so will be none the wiser. 

Perhaps somewhat naively, Hiroko agrees and ends up staying in the house posing as Masakazu’s intended which includes sharing a room. Briefly shifting genres, a training montage sees Hiroko undertaking a crash course in how to be posh, adopting the correct deportment, using cutlery elegantly, and learning to walk downstairs in massive heals or up while wearing an inconveniently long dress. Which is all to say, the fabulously wealthy inhabit a different world of which Hiroko was hitherto ignorant. This is further brought home by the apparent cracks in the foundations of the Sekine family which is also a corporate entity with the other board members largely favouring other candidates more closely connected to the themselves to take over as chairman while apparent liability uncle Masao (Tamio Kawaji), whose creepy crossbow-carrying young son Mamoru is for some reason being raised by Mrs Sekine, is in some kind of trouble with yakuza loansharks. The other main issue is that Mrs Sekine is a second wife and longtime mistress of the late CEO. Masakazu was born out of wedlock and Mrs Sekine will do anything and everything she can to ensure he assumes his birthright. 

Counter-intuitively succession intrigue has little to do with the central mystery which begins to unravel when Hiroko is attacked on the eve of her wedding by a strange woman who had previously tried to warn her off Masakazu and kills her in self-defence. The body, which we can identify as that seen buried in the snow in the solarised green-tinted opening sequence, is taken care of by Mrs Sekine’s right hand man Kinoshita (Hayato Tani), but Hiroko begins to have her doubts after catching sight of a woman who looks exactly like the one she killed at the local ski resort. 

“Rich people are like that. They’d lie about anything in order to keep their wealth” Hiroko is told, realising she may be at the centre of an infinitely complex plot and becoming aware of Mrs Sekine’s tendency to throw money at people to get them to play along with her plans. Like any good gothic mystery, however, the house holds a dark secret in a hidden room which perhaps hints at the corruptions of the Bubble era along with those of the super rich elite and the undue pressure it puts on its young while uncomfortably suggesting that Mrs Sekine herself is the source of the corruption in her attempt to integrate into a higher social class into which she was not born. Atmospheric in its chilling vistas of the freezing snow, Kekkon Annai Mystery’s twisting tale of greed and manipulation may end in tragedy but ironically lives up to its name as its heroine finds a potential match in her accidental co-conspirator. 

Family of Strangers (閉鎖病棟　それぞれの朝, Hideyuki Hirayama, 2019)

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“Things happen to everyone” the hero of Hideyuki Hirayama’s Family of Strangers (閉鎖病棟　それぞれの朝, Heisa Byoutou: Sorezore no Asa, AKA Closed Ward) explains, not in an accusatory sense or attempt to limit someone else’s trauma response but in a gentle spirit of empathy, a reminder that everyone has their own load to carry and theirs are heavier than most. Empathy is indeed a minor theme of Hirayama’s drama as his wounded protagonists eventually find the strength to allow themselves to live again in the unconditional solidarity of their newly found family in defiance of the internalised shame and external stigma that plagues them in an admittedly conformist society. 

Hirayama opens with a flashback, shot in muted colour, as a man, Hide (Tsurube Shofukutei), is marched slowly towards the execution chamber where he is eventually hanged but, inconveniently for the prison authorities, does not die. Lacking a clear precedent for such an unusual event, they are at a loss as to how to proceed while Hide does not exactly seem overjoyed in his improbable survival. As hanging him again would be cruel and simply letting him off as if reborn to live a new life they feel not in the interests of justice, they opt for a fudge, palming the now wheelchair-using Hide off on the hospitals system by placing him in the secure ward of a psychiatric institution. 

A quiet man keeping himself to himself, Hide patiently crafts ceramics and meditates on his crime keeping others at arm’s length as if believing himself unworthy of human society. He may have been sentenced to death for something truly unforgivable, but he is not mentally ill and does not really belong in the hospital whereas many of the other patients are self-committals who are technically free to leave at a time of their own choosing. Chuya (Go Ayano), a young man with schizophrenia, has more or less learned to live with his condition and exercises a greater degree of personal freedom, often venturing into town and bringing back various items he cynically sells to others on the ward. He could leave if he wanted to, but stays partly out of a sense of internalised shame and partly in fear of the outside world. Yuki (Nana Komatsu), meanwhile, an 18-year-old woman committed by her mother (Reiko Kataoka) after becoming worryingly withdrawn, has little personal agency, first placed on the ward and then removed from it neither with her full consent. 

Though we can see that the hospital is a largely positive, supportive place where the patients are well cared for we do not see a great deal of treatment practices and it is in someways surprising that Yuki is allowed to leave in the company of a man who is quite clearly violent and abusive even if we can also infer that she herself has remained largely silent as regards the nature of her trauma. Her silence is perhaps her means of both defence and resistance with her first words offered to Hide largely because he does not ask her for them, merely sitting by giving her the space to choose to speak or not to. Despite his caution that the longer one stays on the ward the more one begins to think of oneself as a patient, she begins to think of the hospital of her safe place and the other patients as her surrogate family, touched by an old woman’s radiant happiness as she helps her back to her room mistaking her for her granddaughter. 

Yet as much as the hospital works for her, it does not necessarily work for others as in the case of Shigemune (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) whose antisocial and violent tendencies often endanger other patients not least because of lax supervision and questionable decisions made by members of staff. A direct parallel is perhaps being drawn between the jail and the ward, Chuya frightened he may never leave while Hide believes he does not deserve to and Yuki longs to stay only to have her new safe place ruined by another predatory man of violence. Yet there is also a sense that society views the hospital as a place to dump those it feels to be problematic, Hide hidden away in embarrassment, Chuya rejected by his family, and Yuki betrayed by a mother who has come to see her as a rival. Shopkeepers look at them askance, not altogether happy that “even crazy people have rights these days” while the trio struggle to accept themselves as having a right to a happier future even as they begin to bond in a newfound sense of family. While the closing scenes may engage in an uncomfortable ableism, there is an undoubtable sense of warmth and compassion in Hirayama’s egalitarian sense of solidarity as his wounded protagonists find strength in faith reflected in others to shake off their sense of internalised shame and claim their right to life in an often hostile society. 

Family of Strangers streams in Germany 1st to 6th June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Boiling Point (３－４Ｘ１０月, Takeshi Kitano, 1990)

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The heroes of Takeshi Kitano’s films are often gentle men, capable of great tenderness but also filled with quietly mounting rage permanently on the brink of explosion. Everyone perhaps has their Boiling Point, the straw that breaks the camel’s back and sends it careering towards a self-destructive attempt at restitution. “Boiling Point”, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the original Japanese title (３－４Ｘ１０月) which references the score on the board at a baseball game and the originally scheduled month of the film’s release, October (it was later moved up to September making the whole thing even more meaningless). This perverse randomness was apparently another minor win for Kitano who had scored a critical hit with his debut feature Violent Cop but had struggled to convince the team around him to embrace his unconventional vision. Working with greater independence, Kitano minimises camera movement in favour long takes with static camera which perfectly compliment his deadpan sense of the absurd. 

He also relegates himself to a supporting role unseen on screen for over half of the running time. Our hero is small town loser Masaki (Yurei Yanagi) who we first meet hiding in a toilet during an amateur baseball game in which he is desperate to play but strikes out when given the opportunity in the first of many petty humiliations. He has been taken under the wing of the team’s coach, Iguchi (Taka Guadalcanal), a former yakuza attempting to go straight by running a dive bar, and has a part-time job at a petrol station. Masaki perhaps images himself as something greater, as evidenced by his extremely cool motorcycle jacket and bike, but is a dreamer at heart, nervous and tongue-tied, unable to unlock his hidden potential. Even he has a boiling point, however, which is later hit when he gets into an altercation with a teddy boy yakuza at the garage who starts a pointless argument about being kept waiting, pulling the old trick of goading Masaki into fighting back to get leverage over their shop and begin extorting it. Masaki has just got his boss into trouble through losing his cool, but is ironically offered a job by a visiting thug jokingly admiring his fighting prowess. 

Iguchi meanwhile is a man divided, permanently on the brink of boiling over. When some irritating sophisticates “ironically” visit his bar clutching their designer handbags and holding their noses, he’s obliged to be nice to them but he simply can’t. Unable to bear their snotty arrogance, he glasses one of the women on the way back from the bathroom and throws the whole gang out. The yakuza has it seems been reawakened, and though he was reluctant before, he to decides approach his old boss, Otomo (Hisashi Igawa), on Masaki’s behalf. The reception he receives is not as he expected. Iguchi is reminded that he chose the civilian life and being a yakuza isn’t a part-time job, you can’t just pick it back up again when it suits you. Not being able to help Masaki is another small humiliation, one he perhaps intends to overcome through turning violence on an old underling who disrespected him in refusing the customary deference. Predictably, it backfires, you can’t be half a yakuza after all. Iguchi is completely finished, boiling with rage but too humiliated to do much about it other than vow revenge by going to Okinawa to buy a gun in order to put an end to the lot of them. To protect his mentor, an oddly yakuza-esque gesture, Masaki volunteers to go in his stead, dragging his catcher friend Kazuo (Duncan) along for the ride. 

A complicated liminal space, Okinawa is both an enticing holiday destination and source of political contention thanks to the controversial presence of the US military bases. It’s indeed corrupt foreign influences who can provide our guys with guns, but Okinawa is also a place slightly out of time, trapped in the Showa-era past while the rest of Japan has already transitioned to an economically prosperous mid-Bubble Heisei. Consequently, these are Showa-era yakuza with fancy outfits and sunshades hanging out in neon-lit bars with butterflies on the walls. Uehara (Takeshi Kitano) is in the process of being humiliated in front of his gang for supposed embezzlement of collective funds. He too wants a gun to enact his revenge, something which he fantasises about in an eerie and fatalistic flash forward. Before that, however, he’s befriended our guys and taken quite a liking to Kazuo, hinting a latent homosexuality in another example of the unwelcome association of queerness and savagery often seen in yakuza movies. Uehara has a girlfriend but treats her with utter contempt, insisting that she sleep with his underling only to punish her for it afterwards and take over halfway through to rape him. In fact all of his subsequent sexual actions are rapes, his assaults on women cold and mechanical as if purely performative, implying that it is his repressed homosexuality which underpins the sense of humiliation that fuels his violence and his cruelty. 

Unlike Uehara and Iguchi, our guys have not even one foot in the yakuza world and despite their ingenious plan to get the guns on the plane have no idea what they’re going to do with them, marching all the way over to Otomo’s before realising they don’t know anything about the use of firearms with the consequence that they become useless lumps of metal in their hands. They are boys playing gangster out of a misguided ideal of heroic nobility in their desire to avenge Iguchi who by all accounts is still sulking alone at home. This is their greatest and final humiliation, failing as men in front of men. Yet, their friendship perhaps survives, patched up in silence over shared ice lollies. Even so, Masaki is about to boil over, travelling towards a split second moment of fiery self-destruction and misdirected rage. But then Kitano pulls the rug out from under us again. Was this all a dream after all, grim wish-fulfilment from a repressed young man longing to burn out bright, or perhaps a lengthy vision of the kind visited on Uehara which would at least explain Kitano’s many non-sequitur cuts and ellipses? Who can say, but the humiliating sense of impossibility is all too real for those unable to take a swing at life’s many opportunities.

Boiling Point is the second of three films included in the BFI’s Takeshi Kitano Collection blu-ray box set and is accompanied by a new audio commentary by Little White Lies’ David Jenkins, plus a featurette recorded in 2016. The first pressing includes a 44-page booklet featuring a piece on Boiling Point from Mark Schilling, an essay on Violent Cop by Tom Mes, an introduction to Kitano’s career & writing on Sonatine by Jasper Sharp, an archival review by Geoff Andrew, and an appreciation of Beat Takeshi by James-Masaki Ryan.

The Takeshi Kitano Collection is released 29th June while Violent Cop, Boiling Point, and Sonatine will also be available to stream via BFI Player from 27th July as part of BFI Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sada (SADA〜戯作・阿部定の生涯, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1998)

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Sada poster“Facts can easily become fiction when recounted by someone, even by oneself. But with a bit of sincerity lies can become truth”, our genial guide explains, paradoxically telling us that the heroine, a woman he regards as a loveable kid sister, wants to tell us her story herself. Apologising in advance for her “rudeness”,  he reveals to us that the woman is none other than the “notorious” Sada Abe, a woman who, apparently now forgotten, was once a front page sensation for having killed her lover and cut off his penis to carry him with her always.

Despite the narrator’s claims that Sada’s fame has faded, her story has proved fertile cinematic ground, most famously inspiring Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses which sees her claustrophobic descent into sexual obsession as a reaction to the intense austerity of militarism. Obayashi, however, is keen to remember that that aside from the newspaper headlines, the salaciousness and peculiar romanticism of her story, Sada was a real woman who suffered in an intensely patriarchal society and was perhaps seeking something that the world was unable to give her.

As she reminds us, Sada too had a childhood. Obayashi opens the film with a young Sada innocently throwing hoops over a tall phallic object. Six years later, her life changes when a college boy drags her off the street into a nearby inn and rapes her, claiming that she is well known as a good time girl and that he is perfectly entitled to behave in the way he is behaving. Deed done, the college boy leaves but Sada (Hitomi Kuroki) is rescued by the gentlemanly figure of sickly medical student Okada (Kippei Shina) who has a patch over his eye and a romantic disposition. Okada gives her not only a lifelong and strangely erotic attachment to donuts, but a junai foundation in an eternally unrealisable longing for a pure and innocent love.

Okada, as Obayashi later tells us, is also a “real” person though he has no real evidence that he and Sada ever crossed paths. He gives her the knife she will later use to sever her lover’s penis and tells her to use it to cut out his heart, which belongs to her. Okada, claiming that he will forever watch over her, introduces a secondary theme in that he is a sufferer of Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, then thought incurable and “treated” only by exile. Sada loses her pure love and never knows why, but sadly chooses not take his advice to remember that she is an honest girl and refuse to be corrupted by her trauma. Now unable to marry and it remaining a virtual impossibility to enter any other kind of profession, Sada becomes a geisha, later giving that up for the more lucrative world of casual sex work.

Perhaps ironically, it’s through her life as a sex worker that Sada begins to find a degree of freedom amidst the impassioned atmosphere of increasing militarism. While the men are caught up in destructive games of martial glory, Sada is just trying to live her many lives and dreaming her dream of love. It’s that dream of love that brings her to Tatsuzo (Tsurutaro Kataoka), a married, poetic ladies’ man with whom she eventually retreats into an isolationist kingdom of two. Yet their intensely co-dependent relationship is never quite enough for her because it fails to marry her physical need with the emotional, and the figure of Okada, the innocent, romanticised white knight of her youth, lingers in her mind. Sada kills Tatsuzo not quite by accident, attempting to take ownership of something which can never be hers in her fiercely patriarchal world where her clients coldly chide her for not being “polite” enough and despite the earning potential of her profession, she remains dependent on men to escape it.

Sada’s “crime” might not quite be revenge for all she’s suffered but it is a pointed act of rebellion towards a conformist society. She laments that her notoriety soon faded, that if being forgotten is like dying then she died long ago, but for a short time all of Japan was captivated not by the outrageous horror of her transgression but by an idea of “romance” that stood behind it as if Sada had moved beyond double suicide into new territories of eternal love through seeking to possess her lover even in death. The narrator, Sada’s sometime pimp, tells us that few remember Sada now and suggests that Japan is once again in a dark age, stopping only to remark that people were beautiful then too despite or perhaps because of the darkness. Fittingly the figure of the “real” Sada retreats and we’re left again with her legend, an imagined future for a woman who faded into pre-war tragedy as a symbol of its dangerous intensity. Even so, Obayashi is intent to show us that there was indeed a woman named Sada Abe who found herself at the mercy of her times but tried to live all the same, dreaming of impossible love in a world of corruption.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Golden Slumber (ゴールデンスランバー, Yoshihiro Nakamura, 2010)

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golden-slumberYoshihiro Nakamura has made a name for himself as a master of fiendishly intricate, warm and quirky mysteries in which seemingly random events each radiate out from a single interconnected focus point. Golden Slumber (ゴールデンスランバー), like The Foreign Duck, the Native Duck and God in a Coin Locker, and Fish Story, is based on a novel by Kotaro Isaka and shares something of the same structure but is far less interested in the mystery itself rather than the man who finds himself caught up in it.

30 year old delivery driver Aoyagi (Masato Sakai) is all set for a nice day out fishing with an old college buddy, Morita (Hidetaka Yoshioka), but he’s about to discover that it’s he’s been hooked and reeled in as the patsy in someone else’s elaborate assassination plot. After grabbing some fast food, Morita takes Aoyagi to a parked car near the closed off area through which the Prime Minster is due to be paraded in an open topped car. Waking up after a brief period of drug induced sedation, Aoyagi is made aware that this has all been a trick – badly in debt thanks to his wife’s pachinko addiction, Morita has betrayed him to a set of undisclosed bad guys with unclear motives and is taking this brief opportunity to give him as much warning as he can. Sure enough, a bomb goes off at the parade and Aoyagi just manages to escape before Morita too is the victim of an explosion.

Aoyagi is now very confused and on the run. Inexplicably, the police seem to have CCTV footage of him in places he’s never been and doing things he’s never done. If he’s going to survive any of this, he’s going to need some help but caught between old friends and new, trust has just become his most valuable commodity.

At heart, Golden Slumber is a classic Wrong Man narrative yet it refuses to follow the well trodden formula in that it isn’t so much interested in restoring the protagonist to his former life unblemished as it is in giving him a new one. The well known Beatles song Golden Slumber which runs throughout the film plays into its neatly nostalgic atmosphere as each of the now 30 year old college friends find themselves looking back into those care free, joyous days before of the enormity of their adult responsibilities took hold. That is to say, aside from Aoyagi himself who seems to have been muddling along amiably before all of this happened to him, unmarried and working a dead end delivery job.

As Morita tells him in the car, it’s all about image. The nature of the conspiracy and the identity of the perpetrators is not the main the main thrust of the film, but the only possible motive suggested for why Aoyagi has been chosen stems back to his unexpected fifteen minutes of fame two years previously when he saved a pop idol from an intruder with a nifty judo move (taught to him by Morita in uni) after fortuitously arriving with a delivery. Those behind the conspiracy intend to harness his still vaguely current profile to grab even more media attention with a local hero turned national villain spin. The Prime Minister, it seems, was a constantly controversial, extreme right wing demagogue with a tendency for making off the cuff offensive statements so there are those who’d rather congratulate Aoyagi than bring him to justice, but anyone who’s ever met him knows none of this can really be true despite the overwhelming video evidence.

Throughout his long odyssey looking for “the way back home” as the song puts it, Aoyagi begins to remember relevant episodes from his life which may feed back into his current circumstances. Although it seems as if Aoyagi had not seen Morita in some time (he knew nothing of his family circumstances, for example) his college friends with whom he wasted time “reviewing” junk food restaurants and chatting about conspiracy theories are still the most important people in his life. Not least among them is former girlfriend Haruko (Yuko Takeuchi), now married and the mother of a little daughter, who seems to still be carrying a torch for her old flame and is willing to go to great lengths to help him in his current predicament.

The film seems mixed on whether these hazy college days are the “golden slumber”, a beautiful dream time enhanced by memory to which it is not possible to return, or whether it refers to Aoyagi’s post college life which impinges on the narrative only slightly when he asks an unreliable colleague for help, aside from an accidental moment of heroic celebrity. It could even refer to the film’s conclusion which, departing from the genre norms, resolves almost nothing save for the hero’s neat evasion of the trap (aided by the vexed conspirators who eventually opt for a plan B). Once there might have been a road home – a way back to the past and the renewing of old friendships, but this road seems closed now, severed by the new beginning promised to Aoyagi who has been robbed of his entire identity and all but the memory of his past. Whether this means that the golden slumber has ended and Aoyagi, along with each of the other nostalgia bound protagonists, must now wake up and start living the life he’s been given, or that the old Aoyagi has been consigned to the realm of golden slumbers, may be a matter for debate.

Though the resolution may appear ultimately unsatisfying, the preceding events provide just enough interconnected absurdity to guide it through. During his long journey, Aoyagi is aided not just by his old friends but new ones too including a very strange young serial killer (Gaku Hamada) and a hospital malingerer with one foot in the “underworld” (Akira Emoto). It speaks to Aoyagi’s character that all of those who know him trust him implicitly and are ready to help without even being asked (even if they occasionally waver under pressure), and even those who are meeting him for the first time are compelled to come to his defence.  An elliptical, roundabout tale of the weight of nostalgia and inescapability of regret, Golden Slumber is the story of a man on the run from his future which eventually becomes a net he cannot escape.

Original trailer (English subtitles – select via menu)