Tag: Haruko Kato

A Thousand & One Nights (千夜一夜物語, Eiichi Yamamoto, 1969)

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one thousand and one nights poster 2The “Godfather of Manga” Osamu Tezuka had been a pioneer of what later became the mainstream of a burgeoning industry, kickstarting TV anime in the process with the long running Astro Boy. His ambitions, however, increasingly ran towards the avant-garde and he feared that the heavy association between his production company, Mushi Pro, and genial kids’ cartoons would only lead to diminishing artistic returns even if the increasing merchandising opportunities would perhaps allow the studio to engage in other less profitable areas such the adult-orientated anime he longed to produce. By the late ‘60s, Tezuka’s polite, inoffensive brand of child-friendly adventure stories were becoming distinctly old hat while the “gekiga” movement, acting more or less in direct opposition, continued to gain ground with older readers keen to move on to more adult fare. The Animerama series was intended to prove that Tezuka still had something new and dynamic to bring to the table and that there was a market for “racy” animation which embraced mature themes and experimental artwork.

The first of the Animerama films, A Thousand & One Nights (千夜一夜物語, Senya Ichiya Monogatari), is, as the title implies, loosely inspired by classic Arabian folktales as its hero “Aldin” (Yukio Aoshima) finds and then loses true love, overcomes the urge for vengeance, is himself corrupted by wealth and power, and then is returned to the very same state in which we first encountered him walking off into the sunset in preparation for the next adventure.

The tale begins with a slave auction at which the lowly water seller Aldin first catches sight of the beautiful Milliam (Kyoko Kishida). He tries to buy her but is too poor while the son of the local police chief (Asao Koike) outbids all to win the prize. However, in the first of many strokes of luck that will befall Aldin, a sandstorm allows him steal away with Milliam who falls in love with him too and gives herself willingly to a man she sees as an equal rather than a master. Sadly, their true love story is short lived and they are soon separated sending Aldin off on a quest to return to his beloved that will only end in tragedy.

Despite the later protestations that the love of Aldin and Milliam is one of equals in which there are no masters or slaves, only a man and a woman, it remains true that Aldin watched the slave auction with a degree of titillation and would have bought Milliam had he only been able to afford her. Surviving on his wits, Aldin is a cheeky chancer waiting for that big lucky break he is sure is waiting somewhere round the corner but he is not, perhaps, above becoming that which oppresses him. Later, having become a wealthy and powerful man, he uses his wealth and his power in the same way that others use theirs against him in pressuring a vulnerable young girl to become his mistress against her will, ripping her away from her own true love in the same way he was once ripped away from Milliam by another man wearing a crown. As a “king” he wonders what “power” is, pushing his as far as it will go in order to find out and risking “losing himself” in a way he’d once thought he’d overcome in rejecting a pointless act of vengeance that would forever have changed him.

Milliam, and later Jallis – the daughter of Aldin and Milliam raised by their worst enemy, Badli (Hiroshi Akutagawa), fight for the right to decide their own romantic destiny. Like Madlia (Sachiko Ito), the feisty bandit’s daughter, they resist the social codes of their era in which women are merely prizes divided among men and actively attempt to free themselves through love only to find defeat and despair. Yet love, or more precisely lust, can also be a force of constraint and or ruin as Aldin discovers on a paradise island when he unwisely decides to abandon Madlia, who has also fallen in love with him, for the empty pleasures of orgiastic sex with the voracious islanders whose unrestrained desire soon threatens to consume him whole.

A picaresque adventure, A Thousand & One Nights is a bawdy, flippant retelling of the Aladdin myth in which the hero begins as a poor yet free and cheerful young man before experiencing what it is to be wealthy and all powerful and discovering that it only makes him mean and miserable. Shifting from model shots to live photography and abstract to cartoonish animation, Yamamoto’s direction may appear restrained in comparison to the more outlandish and surreal Belladonna of Sadness but is a masterclass in finding artistry through budgetary limitations. A psychedelic odyssey through freedom and constraint, desire and obsession, A Thousand & One Nights is a forgotten landmark of experimental animation as relentlessly strange as it is endearing.

Available on blu-ray from Third Window Films as a part of double release with Eiichi Yamamoto & Osamu Tezuka’s Cleopatra.

Original trailer (English subtitles, NSFW)

A Taxing Woman’s Return (マルサの女2, Juzo Itami, 1988)

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Taxing Woman 2 posterA Taxing Woman introduced us to Ryoko Itakura (Nobuko Miyamoto) – an oddball detective working as an insurance inspector who met her Irene Adler in a tax dodging corporate gangster with a limp. A year later she’s back, still the only woman working with the tax inspectorate and apparently still a dogged pursuer of those who would seek to defraud the Japanese government of its rightful earnings. Ryoko may have been a stickler for the rules who applied the same dog with a bone approach to a mom and pop store chowing down on its own supplies as to a dodgy yakuza led conspiracy, but she also believed in justice – something which stands her in good stead when she rubs up against a dodgy cult which, again, is a yakuza front but adds insult to injury by deliberately manipulating the vulnerable.

The action opens with some kids poking at the dead body of a “landshark” floating in a pond before flashing to a meeting of officials sucking crab meat from the shell and wondering what they’re going to do about this land they need cleared now their heavy is out of the picture. The corrupt politician from the first film, Urushibara (Takeya Nakamura), is apparently still involved in semi-legal land deals but palms the assignment off on a colleague. The big wigs need to empty a dated housing complex on some valuable land so they can build a vanity skyscraper – office space apparently being scarce in mid bubble Tokyo.

To do this they enlist the services of dodgy cult leader Onizawa (Rentaro Mikuni) and his troop of yakuza goons. Most of the tenants have already signed but they have three key holdouts – a diner owner clinging on to the family legacy, a stubborn paparazzo, and an intellectual professor who heads up the housing association. Unlike the yakuza of Taxing Woman, these guys have not reformed – they are the new/old style of lawless thugs who are perfectly prepared to threaten women and children to get their own way. Making it impossible for the tenants to stay through intimidation and noise torture, they stoop to blackmail to seal the deal.

Despite arriving only a year after A Taxing Woman, Taxing Woman’s Return (マルサの女2, Marusa no Onna 2) takes place in a much darker, though more obviously comedic, world. Whereas the earlier film adopted a noticeably ambivalent attitude to the tax inspectors and the enterprising gangsters, the villains of A Taxing Woman’s Return are so heinous and morally bankrupt as to be entirely indefensible even if the inspectorate takes a turn for the bumbling to compensate. The “cult” is, of course, merely a convenient money laundering front and tax dodge for the yakuza – religious organisations are exempt from taxation in the vast majority of cases which may be why the local tax office records hundreds of registered “religious bodies” in its jurisdiction alone. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its loyal followers, often vulnerable people looking for spiritual fulfilment but being bled dry by the money hungry cultists while the leader’s wife swans around in sables costing more than the average annual salary. A desperate devotee in need of a loan puts his own teenage daughter up as collateral only to see her raped by Onizawa, eventually becoming pregnant by him at only 16 years of age and thereafter becoming his devoted concubine in a bizarre instance of Stockholm Syndrome.

Yet for all the background darkness of weird cultists and nasty yakuza backed up by corrupt and venial politicians, Itami ups the cartoonish sense of the absurd with our hero Ryoko clambering over rooftops to listen in to the bad guys while her boss throws himself down flights of stairs and has to battle piercing sirens to get into the villains’ secret vault. It is however a dark humour as the opening makes plain with its troupe of little children staring at the strange shape floating in the water – a motif later repeated when a yakuza is gunned down in the street only for another group of children to pour over him as he expires, a single tear rolling down his cheek. The original spongy white body gives way to the businessmen sucking spongy white crab out its shell while insensitively discussing the late land shark, and the yakuza are unafraid to deploy a maggot infested severed hand (thankfully a fake picked up from a friend who makes horror movies) to convince the tenants they mean business.

At the end of A Taxing Woman, the gangster and the inspector reached something of a truce but one which came down, broadly, on the side of right. This time things aren’t quite so simple. The conspiracy is bigger and deeper, stretching all the way into the Diet and about more than just office space in still developing Tokyo. Onizawa, regarding himself as public servant, tries to say he did it all for his country, that if someone didn’t get their hands dirty Tokyo would be eclipsed by Hong Kong or Seoul. A post-war justification for a bubble era problem, but one that takes us straight back to the first film in Onizawa’s second proposition that only through money does he truly feel “immortal”. He may be a liar and a cheat, but he’s only a symptom of rapidly spreading infection, one which Ryoko and her team are powerless to cure, trapped on the wrong side of the fence while the bad guys build monuments to economic hubris, indulging in vanity in an era of bad faith which is about to be brought to a rather abrupt close.

Currently available to stream in the US/UK via FilmStruck.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Love in the Mud (泥だらけの純情, Sokichi Tomimoto, 1977)

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Love in the Mud posterJapanese youth cinema was in a strange place by the late 1970s. Angsty seishun eiga had gone out with Nikkatsu’s move into Roman Porno and the artier, angry youth films coming out through ATG were probably not much for a teen audience. The Kadokawa idol movie was only a few years away but until then, films like Love in the Mud (泥だらけの純情, Dorodarake no Junjo) arrived to plug the gap. Based on a novella by Shinji Fujiwara which had been previously adapted by Ko Nakahira in 1963 in a version starring Sayuri Yoshinaga and Mitsuo Hamada, Love in the Mud is a classic tale of poor boy meets rich girl and ends in a predictably hopeless way but in deep contrast to the prevailing culture of the time, the film takes the “junjo” or “purity” in its title literally in its innocent chasteness.

As the camera pans over a rapidly developing city, it settles on a bright red, flashy sports car being driven by Mami (Momoe Yamaguchi), the daughter of the Japanese Ambassador to Spain, with her friend sitting cheerfully in the passenger seat. Disaster strikes when the pair are run off the road by a biker gang who taunt them from outside the car, threatening rape and robbery. Luckily for them another gangster turns up, beats up the bad guys and saves the girls but alarm bells should have been ringing when he asks Mami to step out of the car and “thank him properly”. Mami, stupidly, does what she’s told and the girls are hijacked by gangsters round two. When they reach the shady place the gangsters are planning to have their wicked way with them, a third wave of gangster appears, disapproves of the goon’s intentions and heroically fights them off. However, the girls’ saviour is stabbed in the stomach and then later stabs and kills the leader of the aggressors.

The noble gangster, Jiro (Tomokazu Miura), tells the girls to run – which they do, but somehow Mami can’t quite bring herself leave him. A thoroughly middle-class girl, Mami is at university studying English literature but her dream is to open a hat shop in Paris and she spends most of her spare time working with a hat designer. In the absence of her father, Mami’s uncle (Ko Nishimura) has been looking after her but is the classic upperclass male who thinks the hat stuff is just a hobby and what Mami needs is a good husband as soon as possible. Accordingly he’s set her up with a pleasant enough business contact he hopes will both support Mami in the manner to which she’s been accustomed and his business dealings too.

Your average teenage girl might not be in such an extreme situation as young Mami, but most can certainly sympathise with her lack of agency. The life her uncle has planned for her is not what she wants but more than that, she’s acutely aware of being denied a choice in her future. She may be rich, but she’s never been free. Jiro, by contrast, grew up poor in tragic family circumstances and enjoys his own kind of freedom even if he feels himself constrained by his social class and lack of opportunities following a life in care with no real education. Not actually a yakuza but a gambler and petty punk living on the fringes of the underworld, Jiro has been content to live a meaningless life of empty gains but as his rescuing of Mami and her friend shows, he has a kind heart which extends to delivering presents to the daughter of a melancholy bar hostess currently living in an orphanage.

Jiro’s nobility is of a true and pure kind. After Mami comes forward to testify in Jiro’s defence, she tries to strike up a friendship but Jiro rebuffs her. He’s too smart not to know posh girl and poor boy never ends well, but then they do have a real connection which proves hard to kill. Their social differences are made apparent when Mami makes the naive decision to invite Jiro to a party at her fancy mansion. He buys a nice suit and an expensive necklace as a present, but Mami’s nanny doesn’t want to let him in and when Mami introduces Jiro to her uncle he whips out a checkbook causing Jiro to leave enraged. Nevertheless Mami chases Jiro through the shadier parts of Shinjuku, taking her first taste of gyoza, frequenting underground nightclubs and mahjong parlours, and swapping her elegant outfits for the casual jeans and T-shirts of Jiro’s world.

While all of this is going on, Jiro is also embroiled in the gang trouble which started with the stabbing in the beginning. A “friend”, almost, of the local policeman, it’s not surprising suspicion falls on Jiro and he faces a bleak future if he chooses to remain in Shinjuku. The courtship of the pair is a stuttering, nervous affair in which the emboldened Mami chases Jiro whose sense of honour teaches him to try and avoid her all the while he too is smitten. This is, however, a chaste and innocent love. Jiro and Mami spend a night together gazing at the moon but all they do is talk and the climax of the romance is met firstly with an innocent hug, and then a troubling slap from Jiro which is designed to show the depth his love in his desire to push Mami away, rather than anything more explicit.

A tragic tale of love across the class divide, Love in the Mud indulges the worst aspects of its genre in the fetishisation of doomed romance and extreme dedication the idea of “pure” emotion. The force that keeps Jiro and Mami apart, rather than entrenched social mores and differing forms of oppression is a kind of fatalistic pessimism which says the only true love is death. Perhaps too innocent and too chaste, Love in the Mud never earns its melodramatic ending but does what it needs to in appealing to its teenage target audience, neatly anticipating the genial edginess of the idol movie but failing to move much beyond capturing its moment as a snapshot of late ’70s youth culture.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

 

Someday, Someone Will Be Killed (いつか誰かが殺される, Yoichi Sai, 1984)

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Haruki Kadokawa dominated much of mainstream 1980s cinema with his all encompassing media empire perpetuated by a constant cycle of movies, books, and songs all used to sell the other. 1984’s Someday, Someone Will be Killed (いつか誰かが殺される, Itsuka Dareka ga Korosareru) is another in this familiar pattern adapting the Kadokawa teen novel by Jiro Akagawa and starring lesser idol Noriko Watanabe in one of her rare leading performances in which she also sings the similarly titled theme song. The third film from Korean/Japanese director Yoichi Sai, Someday, Someone Will be Killed is an impressive mix of everything which makes the world Kadokawa idol movies so enticing as the heroine finds herself unexpectedly at the centre of an ongoing international conspiracy protected only by a selection of underground drop outs but faces her adversity with typical perkiness and determination safe in the knowledge that nothing really all that bad is going to happen.

The film opens with a strange, often forgotten subplot as an eccentric elderly lady, apparently loathed by her children who are taking bets on when she will die, celebrates her birthday by announcing a new game – taking the first syllables of her children’s names she comes up with that of our heroine – Atsuko Moriya (Noriko Watanabe), whom she intends to invite to her party. Approaching the end of high school, Atsuko is an ordinary girl of the time which is to say her interests are studying, shopping, and boys. Her father is a reporter for a newspaper who is often away but has returned to take her on a rare shopping trip. Revealing that he was actually born abroad, her father slips a floppy disc into her handbag and disappears after going to make a phonecall while Atsuko is occupied in the fitting room. Striking up a friendship with the store assistant, Cola (Masato Furuoya), Atsuko is taken in by a collection of fake fashion peddling drop outs from society while she tries to work out what’s going on with her dad and what she’s supposed to do with the much sought after floppy disk.

Like many a Kadokawa heroine, Atsuko is quickly plunged into a dark and complicated world she is ill equipped to understand but in keeping with the nature of the genre the atmosphere is largely dictated by her typically teenage outlook. Despite the increasingly high stakes, the film remains bright and cheerful as Atsuko continues in her quest without fear or danger. Her main allies are a computer nerd (Toshinori Omi) who has such a crush on her he’s created his own 8-bit Atsuko operating system complete with palm reader door lock for his base of operations, and the guys from the fashion store who, it transpires, are a gang of counterfeiting squatters. A thoroughly middle class girl, Atsuko reacts negatively to her new found friends and their unusual domestic arrangements but quickly warms to them as they show her nothing but kindness and acceptance, even risking their own existence in an attempt to help her uncover the circumstances surrounding her father’s disappearance.

Fathers become something of a running theme as Atsuko’s solid relationship with hers is contrasted both with Cola’s disconnection from his family and his new found role as a kind of surrogate father for a little girl at the commune. Later the same theme resurfaces as Atsuko uncovers the truth behind her father’s birth which explains the dreams she often has of a bright red sun setting over a wide river. These circumstances are echoed in the strange atmosphere of the mansion at which the film begins as its eccentric, regency dressing older lady engages with her seemingly resentful children in a cold and severe manner. An insert song playing as Atsuko and Cola take a drive wonders what the point of family is, but Atsuko’s concern is less than with the nature of familial bonds than with her own identity as filtered through that of her father and her discoveries of his apparently mysterious birth and career. Thus her final decision becomes one which sets her on a course of growing up in a quest for self knowledge and the creation of an identity which is both of her own making and takes into account her new found family history.

Making room for a musical sequence in which Atsuko picks up a guitar and embarks on a rendition of Summertime as well a few insert songs alongside the title track, Someday, Someone Will be Killed is pure Kadokawa idol movie but Sai makes sure to up the stakes with some genuinely exciting action sequences and mounting tension as Atsuko finds herself in way over her head. Of course there are a few comic moments too including the unfortunate detective charged with locating Atsuko to give her the invitation to the old lady’s ball who often finds himself beaten up by mistake by one side or the other. Very much of its time with its cold war paranoia coupled with up to the minute technology, Someday, Someone Will be Killed is among the darker of the idol dramas Kadokawa had to offer but nevertheless remains rosy and innocent in terms of outlook right up until Atsuko takes off on her motorbike in search of the woman she’ll eventually become.

Title track sung by Noriko Watanabe Itsuka Dareka ga…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDkCVdkxfBk

The Mamiya Brothers (間宮兄弟, Yoshimitsu Morita, 2006)

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mamiya-brothersEver the populist, Yoshitmitsu Morita returns to the world of quirky comedy during the genre’s heyday in the first decade of the 21st century. Adapting a novel by Kaori Ekuni, The Mamiya Brothers (間宮兄弟, Mamiya Kyodai) centres on the unchanging world of its arrested central duo who, whilst leading perfectly successful, independent adult lives outside the home, seem incapable of leaving their boyhood bond behind in order to create new families of their own.

Older bother Akinobu (Kuranosuke Sasaki) and younger brother Tetsunobu (Muga Tsukaji) live together in a small apartment in Tokyo where they enjoy hanging out keeping track of baseball games and watching movies rented from the local store where Akinobu has a crush on the cashier, Naomi (Erika Sawajiri). They are perfectly happy but sometimes frustrated that they don’t have girlfriends so they decide to host a curry party and invite Naomi over in the hopes that she might develop an affection for Akinobu. So that she won’t feel weird about going to the house of two middle-aged guys she doesn’t really know, Tetsunobu invites a reserved teacher, Yoriko (Takako Tokiwa), from the primary school he works at as a caretaker though he “never dates coworkers” and is only really asking her as a backup for Akinobu.

Against expectation the both ladies agree to attend the curry party which actually goes pretty well though neither man is fully capable of following up on the opportunities presented to him. Outside events provide a distraction as Akinobu is swept into his adulterous boss’ divorce crisis and Tetsunobu becomes fixated on a damsel in distress who has no desire to be rescued by him. As much as the boys might want to form independent relationships for female companionship, their brotherly bond is more akin to a marriage in itself leaving both of them unwilling to abandon the status quo for a new kind of happiness.

These kinds of closely interdependent sibling relationships are more often seen between sisters, often as one or both of them has rejected offers of marriage for fear of leaving the other on the shelf. Elderly spinsters and their histories of unhappy romance are almost a genre in themselves though they often present the peaceful co-existence of the two women as a double failure and ongoing tragedy rather than a perfectly legitimate choice each may have made to reject the normal social path and rely solely on each other. The Mamiya Brothers neatly subverts this stereotype, presenting the relationship of the two men as a broadly happy one though perhaps tinged with sadness as it becomes clear that the intense bond they share is holding each of them back in a kind of never ending childhood.

Indeed, though they live alone together and have steady jobs, whilst in each other’s company the brothers regress back to childhood by spending their spare time riding bikes around the neighbourhood and playing on the beach. They are each keenly aware of how they must appear to members of the opposite sex and are always mindful not to appear “creepy”. Accordingly, they’re careful about which DVDs they check out so that Naomi doesn’t get a bad impression of them, and they’re sure to make it clear that both girls can bring other people to their parties so they won’t think there’s anything untoward going on. Throwing quick fire questions back for and constantly making references to private jokes the boys are effectively a manzai duo performing for an audience of two, perpetually suffocating inside their self made bubble.

Though they might not find love, the boys do at least make some new friends. Naomi’s sister, Yumi (Keiko Kitagawa), is exactly the kind of girl they’d usually steer clear of lest she begins to make fun of their old fashioned ways yet she actually becomes an ally and even a friend after spending time hanging out in the brothers’ odd little world. Yumi and Naomi are, in many ways, almost as closely connected as Akinobu and Tetsunobu though they both currently have boyfriends even if they find them equally disappointing.

The teacher, Yoriko, also finds herself unlucky in love as she pursues a relationship with a colleague who doesn’t seem particularly invested in her and is lackadaisical about even the smallest forms of commitment. Tetsunobu seems to have discounted her as a romantic partner under his “no coworkers” rule and is either unaware or deliberately ignoring her growing feelings for him. It may be that he invited Yoriko as a love interest for his brother precisely because he was interested himself and wanted to eliminate the problem, but he may come to regret outwardly rejecting this chance of mutual affection turning into something more solid.

When push comes to shove it might just be that the Mamiya Brothers are happiest in their own company and have no desire to move on and leave their arrested development behind. Though tinged with a degree of lingering sadness as it appears the boys do have a desire to form bonds outside of their mutually dependent bubble, they are after all quite happy and mostly fulfilled in their life together. Cute and quirky, if at times melancholic, The Mamiya Brothers is a strange tale of modern romance in a world where no one really grows up anymore. The brothers are clearly not afraid of broadening their horizons, but might prefer to continue doing so together rather than finding their own, independent, paths.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5tu-dbCDqs

Still Walking (歩いても歩いても, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2008)

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still walkingLife is full of choices, but the one thing you can’t choose is your family. Like it or not you’re stuck with them for life and even if you decide you want nothing to do with them ever again, they’ll still be hanging round in the back of your mind for evermore. Koreeda swings the camera back around the fulcrum of Japanese society for this dissection of the fault lines and earthquake zones rubbing up against this very ordinary family.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that some kind of celebration is about to take place at the beginning of Still Walking (歩いても歩いても, Aruitemo Aruitemo) yet the event that is about to bring scattered friends and family members back home is of a more somber nature. As the matriarch Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) peels vegetables with her daughter Chinami (YOU) she seems excited at the prospect of getting the family back together again yet melancholic and perhaps a little nervous.

Younger son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) is taking the train in with his new wife and stepson. He urges Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) that they should make their excuses and leave in time for the last train but she feels obliged to stay over. It’s clear Ryota is not looking forward to a reunion with his family and also has some current worries over his working situation which are weighing on his mind and which he definitely does not want anyone in the family to find out about.

Ryota has a particularly strained relationship with his difficult doctor father, Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) who doted on his oldest son, Junpei, drowned at sea whilst saving the life of a little boy. Increasingly grumpy that he has no heir for his medical practice, Kyohei refuses to recognise Ryota as a grown man or accept his work as an art restorer as a “real” occupation. Tensions in the family are further brought out by the mild disapproval over Ryota’s choice of wife who was previously married and then widowed and has a young son by her first husband. Toshiko for one still harbours an old fashioned stigma towards second marriages and thinks Ryota could have done better than “buying second hand”. Though seemingly accepting of her new daughter-in-law and grandson, she perhaps treats them a little more like guests than fully fledged members of the family.

Set over the course of two days, Still Walking takes on a sense of Chekovian wit and melancholy as it paints a naturalistic picture of an ordinary family with all of the petty cruelties and indignation that involves. The deceased son, Junpei, has become a virtual saint, forever bathed in golden light by his grieving parents while Ryota remains very much alive yet pushed into the shadows. Feeling himself to raise only feelings of disappointment in his family, he adopts a truculent, defensive air which sees him unwilling to engage leaving the bulk of the work for his new wife who is eager to please her in-laws despite their frequent tactlessness in dealing with herself and her son.

Of course, Ryota and his father aren’t so different at all – both gruff, defensive, grumpy. Kyohei is a difficult man sinking into a miserable old age where he can no longer busy himself with the role which has given his life meaning, that of a respected small town doctor. When bubbly younger sister Chinami mentions having seen a newspaper report which referred to painting restorers as “art doctors”, neither man is very happy with being linked with the other yet there is a certain commonality between them that oddly forces them apart rather than ties them together.

Toshiko by contrast is the long suffering yet largely silent housewife whose maternal grief is the force which now defines her. Seemingly sweet and kind on the outside, there’s a tough core in the middle which gives way to some decidedly biting remarks lightly peppering the atmosphere with ancient resentments. Perhaps feeling a strange sort of kinship with the mystery guest-cum-kicking-boy-of-the-day – Yoshio, the boy who Junpei saved but has not made good on his investment as he’s turned into a slobbish and overweight 25 year old child who can’t seem to settle on one proper career, Ryota asks why his mother insists on inviting him every year knowing how painful it must be for him to come. Toshiko coldly replies that that’s exactly the reason she intends to keep making him visit, she feels wretched inside 24/7 so for one day every year she makes someone else feel dreadful too – will anyone blame her for that?

Grief and loss play a heavy part here, not only of the literal kind, but in the feeling of time wasted and the disappearing moments which can never be recaptured. Chinami’s son and daughter team up with Ryota’s stepson Atsushi to provide a melancholic mirror of the the three Yokoyama children playing in the same fields and staring at the same fleeting flowers as their forebears did years before. Time is always passing, you think there will always be another opportunity for saying something or other, forging a connection or new memory but soon enough the sand in the glass runs through. As Ryota notes, it’s always a little later than you think but you can’t see it until it’s already too late.

Dense with naturalistic detail, Still Walking is a warm if sad look at one ordinary family dealing with the aftermath of tragedy yet offers its own comments on the nature of human connection between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and between the living and the dead. A timely reminder of the transience of all things, Koreeda’s most straightforward take on the family drama proves a both profound and moving experience which only deepens with repeated viewing.

I rewatched this recently at an ICA members’ screening where it screened on 35mm but the print actually had an intermission built into it even though the film isn’t all that long – strange experience!

Still Walking is available on DVD and VOD in the UK from New Wave Films and was also released on blu-ray in the US as part of the Criterion Collection.

The film’s Japanese title Aruitemo Aruitemo is taken from the song made famous by Ayumi Ishida – Blue Light Yokohama which turns out to have a surprising significance within the film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ7RiVZvc-Y

 

Capone Cries a Lot (カポネおおいになく, Seijun Suzuki, 1985)

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1040003_lNever one to be accused of clarity, Seijun Suzuki’s Capone Cries a Lot (カポネおおいになく, Capone Ooni Naku) is one of his most cheerfully bizarre movies coming fairly late in his career yet and neatly slotting itself in right after Suzuki’s first two Taisho era movies, Zigeunerweisen and Kageroza. Though not part of the so called “Taisho trilogy” (this would be completed with Yumeji in 1991), Capone Cries a Lot begins its tale in the short lived period between the ages of Meiji and Showa when the world seemed open and foreign influence flooded into this once isolated nation. Could that influence also travel upstream? Naniwa-bushi, for example, could could a Naniwa-bushi singer on the run make something of himself in the New World?

Like most of Suzuki’s movies, plot is a secondary concern. However, loosely speaking, our protagonist is Jun – a man who wanted to learn the art of Naniwa-bushi from its accepted master but ultimately ran off with another man’s wife and ended up in 1920s America. Once there he hooks up the Japanese gangster Gun-tetsu who makes use of Jun’s sake making experience to assist in his bootlegging business during prohibition. This brings them in contact with the Capones, firstly with Frank and eventually with Al (who Jun amusingly mistakes for the president of the United States). Meanwhile, Jun’s girl, Kozome, has left him (to an extent) and become a prostitute. However well things seem to be going for Jun, he’s still a foreigner in a strange, and sometimes unkind, land. Is this the sort of place where dreams can survive?

Suzuki films the whole thing in Japan at an abandoned theme park which is 100% Americana – the Old West tricked out with cowboys, saloons and guns. Now it’s strange kind of new city populated by runaway Japanese criminals gambling and whoring their way through life. Jun wants to sing Naniwa-bushi in this odd place even if no one understands him. Originally he’s annoyed by the foreigners laying a hand on his shamisen or making attempts to join in with their jazz inflected modern music, but eventually he’s singing new Naniwa-bushi songs about the plight of the Native Americans and finally joining the jazz band for a full on musical fusion number. Suzuki does not shy away from the racial politics and problems inherent in his critique of American imperialism even up to an including the KKK and the Japanese internment camps.

In contrast to the previous two Taisho set films, Capone is much lighter in tone and obviously more playful even if it includes a similar level of oblique surrealism. Chaplin references and slapstick humour mix with absurdist dialogue and cosmic silliness to create a popcorn candy world that’s still somehow sad and strange. It’s a vision of America filtered through ‘20s gangster pics and B-movie westerns, equal parts bubblegum and tommy guns. It doesn’t make a great deal of literal sense but offers plenty of Suzuki’s psychedelic eye for colour, surprising editing choices and all round idiosyncratic approach to storytelling.

There may be ample reasons why Capone Cries a Lot has never found an overseas audience, it’s a little overlong for one and its comments on race are perhaps a little uncomfortable from several different angles. Nevertheless, it’s another characteristically zany effort from Suzuki and full of colourful pop aesthetics that are much more playful than the rather heavier Zigeunerweisen and Kageroza. Well worth the long strange ride, Capone Cries a Lot is a trip to 1920s candy land that few of the directors devotees will be able to resist.

(Unsubtitled) Scene from midway through the film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_ILc3zQ7nE