Tag: Ittoku Kishibe

Survive Style 5+ (Gen Sekiguchi, 2004)

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“What is your function in life?” It is, after all, quite a difficult question as an air stewardess (Tae Kimura) points out when interrogated by an irate British hitman (Vinnie Jones), and perhaps one that most people never really think about. Indeed, many of those questioned struggle with the meaning of “function”, replying with the most obvious answer of their occupation or job title without really considering any deeper implications or whether their existence is really meaningful. The hitman seems to have a secondary mission of eliminating those whom he deems “unnecessary”, while simultaneously giving his only sign of approval to a man who straightforwardly tells him that he doesn’t have one.

Gen Sekiguchi’s Survive Style 5+ is full of this kind of questioning but ultimately a tale of how one learns to survive in an often absurd world. Like many films from the mid-2000s, it cuts between several interwoven plot threads that at first seem nonsensical but finally coalesce into a complete whole. An artist (Tadanobu Asano) repeatedly kills his wife (Reika Hashimoto) who is forever trying to kill him in bizarre ways only for her to respawn back at their very weird Western-style country lodge in the woods. An ad executive (Kyoko Koizumi) becomes fed up with her vain hypnotist boyfriend (Hiroshi Abe) who mocks her career. A salaryman (Ittoku Kishibe) is hypnotised to think that he’s a chicken, and a trio of burglars (Kanji Tsuda, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Jai West) deal with repressed emotion and romantic longing. 

They are all to some extent trying to find some way to survive along with a sense of purpose in their lives. Ad executive Yoko is forever coming up with zany ideas for TV adverts that she records on her dictaphone, sniggering to herself at their surreal humour though she is the only one who finds them funny and her work is often dismissed by her corporate clients who complain that her ads don’t do anything to inform the prospective customer about the nature of the product. Sekiguchi was himself also a director of TV adverts which informs the film’s short and snappy style, and Yoko’s artistic frustrations perhaps echo his own as she tries to fulfil herself creatively while meeting the client’s demands. 

The CEO of the pharmaceuticals company she’s working with (Shinichi Chiba) is forever taking “emergency” calls from his wife about such important issues as the bulb having gone in the bathroom which he treats with the upmost seriousness while admitting that he really doesn’t know how to address any of these domestic issues. Similarly, the salaryman is prevented from living a full family life because of the demands of his job, but becomes a temporary hero after getting tickets to see the sold-out hypnotist. In someways, he might even be happier as a bird which after all offers more “freedom” if only he could learn to fly. While his wife and daughter are most interested in curing him so that he can become a stereotypical salaryman again and fulfil the roles of father and husband by providing for the family, only his son determines to accept his father’s new reality and love him for who he is now. 

The family’s home is designed with an artificial quality giving it the appearance of the set for a TV sitcom, bearing out the ersatz nature of conventional family life in which everyone is forced to bear out their particular “function” without imbuing it with much meaning. When the burglars break in, they too inhabit this space as if they were children who’ve come over to play by sitting down and playing cards rather than looting the place, though it turns out the family don’t actually have very much worth stealing. While Tsuda is forever taking calls from a girlfriend, Morishita and J exchange a series of longing looks but are otherwise unable to express their feelings for each other due to lingering societal homophobia and emotional vulnerability. Only when challenged by the hitman are they able to express their feelings after questioning their own “function in life”.

Jones was clearly hired for his hardman image which he’d successfully brought off the football pitch and into a series of gangster movies in the late 90s, imbuing each of his lines with an absurd intensity which is equally matched by Yoshiyoshi Arawakawa’s comical attempts to echo his intimidating speech patterns as his interpreter though without the physical presence to pull it off. The hitman is quite clearly a harbinger of death, but at the same time it’s his existential probing that points the way towards survival as his various targets are forced to consider what their “function in life” really is and if they’re living in ways that are meaningful and fulfilling. The film’s anarchic production design and deadpan humour add to the sense of surreality as Sekiguchi gleefully ricochets between one storyline and another looking for new modes of survival in an increasingly absurd world.

Survive Style 5+ is currently screening in select UK cinemas and released on UHD/Bluray on 19th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Trailer (dialogue free)

Face (顔, Junji Sakamoto, 2000)

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In some ways an innocent’s voyage through the nihilistic landscape of mid-90s Japan, Junji Sakamoto’s Face (顔, Kao) is also a character study of a woman who developed a fear of being seen, in large part because of social prejudice. In a heartbreaking moment, Masako (Naomi Fujiyama) reveals that her father, who left when she was 10, told her that she didn’t have to learn to swim or ride a bike if she didn’t want to. But Masako did want to learn, she just felt she couldn’t because people found her clumsiness “embarrassing”. It’s not completely clear whether Masako’s father said that because he felt bad seeing Masako being picked on by the other kids, or if he too felt ashamed that his daughter was evidently a little different from the other children.

It’s this sense of rejection and loathing that’s manifested in Masako’s bar hostess sister, Yukari (Riho Makise) who is exploitative of her, pressuring her to mend clothing belonging to one of her customers, and becoming physically abusive by tripping her when she refuses. Yukari lies that their mother agrees Masako should be institutionalised, provoking her into a rare trip out of her house running out into the snow in only her slippers and taking a round-trip on a train until Yukari’s gone. The two women are almost polar opposites, and in some ways Yukari’s cruelty may be motived by seeing in Masako’s face the elements of herself that she most fears and dislikes.

Nevertheless, when their mother dies and Yukari implies she plans to turn the family dry cleaner’s into a cafe evicting Masako in the process, Masako ends up snapping and strangling Yukari with her unfinished knitting. In killing Yukari she has, in a sense, freed herself from the oppressiveness of her hate and the inferiority complex it produced in her. Forced on the run on the eve of the Kobe earthquake, she believes the disaster to be her fault, but also takes advantage of the chaos to disappear into a crowd of other displaced persons making their way towards Osaka. It’s there she ends up getting a job at a love hotel under the name of new wave actress “Mariko Kaga,” but every time she starts to settle into a new life and blossoms when surrounded by more supportive presences, her new family quickly crumbles and she’s forced back on the run.

In an ironic twist, many of the ruined men she comes across, some of whom sexually assault her, take on the role of the father she never had. The manager at the love hotel (Ittoku Kishibe) tries to teach her how to ride a bike, though he is privately drowning in gambling debts and about to lose everything. Later she’s sold by a man trying to escape his life as a yakuza to a regular at a bar where she’s been working who bizarrely also begins to teach her to swim. The man who assaulted her originally had lost work because of the earthquake and tried to exorcise his sense of powerlessness by forcing himself on Masako. Her decision to hand him some of the funeral condolence money she stole before leaving is her way of reasserting power over the situation, paying him for this life lesson and shifting the stigma back onto him rather than accept it herself. 

Hiroyuki (Etsushi Toyokawa), the former yakuza, may have sold her as a kind of revenge seeing as he seems to resent her for her difference, but also identifies with her seeing them both as “losers”, which is a label Masako no longer really agrees with. But unlike her, Hiroyuki can no longer escape his fate and the yakuza is not often an occupation you can just give up even if it were not for vague hints at trouble in the city that’s forced him back to pleasant onsen town Beppu on the southern island Kyushu. Even the man that Masako takes a liking to simply because he’s kind to her (Koichi Sato) has recently been made redundant. His wife has left him with their young son and he’s resorted to blackmailing his former employer to get what he’s owed. This breach of the employer-employee contract exemplifies the sense of betrayal among people of this generation who were promised jobs for life under the post-war salaryman model but have been chewed up and spit out by the post-Bubble economy.

Masako, however, is flourishing during her life on the run. Her family had treated her as if she had some kind of learning difficulties and had forced her into a kind of arrested development in which she feared the outside world and had poorly developed social skills. The scars of her trauma are literally manifested on her face after she falls off her bicycle, but it’s true enough that through her various experiences she is able to take on different personas only for her actual face to give her away in the end. Just as after she’d run away, Masako encountered a strange and possibly over-friendly woman in a cafe who is later revealed to be a fugitive, like her on the run for murder, modelled in the real life murderer Kazuko Fukuda who evaded the police for over 14 years through having repeated plastic surgery. Masako never alters her face, in fact it’s ironically her true face that becomes further exposed as she comes into herself thanks to those she meets, but is able to become various other people hinting at all the lives she was denied as Masako the despised sister hunched over a sewing machine. Though contemporary Japan may seem to be a bleak and hopeless place, denying Masako the romantic fulfilment and happy life she longed for, it’s she alone who wants to live, desperately swimming out to sea having been pushed all the way out of Japan but forever in search of new horizons.

Many Happy Returns (教祖誕生, Toshihiro Tenma, 1993)

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Cults, or “new religion” organisations as they’re euphemistically known, proliferated in Japan after the war. Though people may have joined them out of loneliness in search of new families or communities, the numbers only seemed to increase in the era of high prosperity as a sense of spiritual emptiness countered the age of consumerism. Coming in 1993 and based on Takeshi Kitano’s own novel, Many Happy Returns Toshihiro Tenma’s (教祖誕生, Kyoso Tanjo) approaches the issue with a genial humour that likely became impossible two years later with the involvement of Aum in the Tokyo subway attack.

Kazuo (Masato Hagiwara), a wandering young man, asks himself why people join join cults while insisting that all looks so fake but later becomes fascinated with them himself. He can tell that the elderly woman who can suddenly walk again after an encounter with the leader (Masami Shimojo) is probably a plant, but is intrigued rather than outraged. Shiba (Takeshi Kitano), the actual “leader” of the group, tells him that it doesn’t matter. The leader healed the lady before at some point in the past, and they’re just reenacting it to show the power of god, which doesn’t really make sense, but it seems to satisfy Kazuo for the moment. 

Of course, Shiba and Go (Ittoku Kishibe) are just a pair of yakuza types running a religious cult as a business to fleece money out of vulnerable people in the countryside by making them think their leader can make all their problems better. The only thing is, Shiba and Go seem to be the only ones who know it’s all fake while current leader has started to believe that he actually has real healing powers despite using an electricity generator to create the sparks of energy flying from his hands during his healing sessions. Though the old lady in a wheelchair is a plant, the leader sometimes agrees to heal other people who request it, which could end up backfiring if Shiba can’t find a way to fake the miracle.

After becoming alarmed that the Leader is too into his religious speeches and has fallen victim to his own patter despite obviously knowing that it’s all made up, Shiba and Go pay him to leave the cult but are then left with a dilemma over how to appoint a successor. Komamura (Koji Tamaki), who’d tried to undermine Shiba’s leadership, is a religious zealot who joined the cult to be closer to god. He objects to Shiba’s godless ways, and while Shiba briefly considers making him the leader to keep him quiet, ends up appointing Kazuo who only recently started tagging along with the cult.

Though Kazuo was originally only interested in the cult precisely because it was fake, once he becomes the leader he starts to think it’s real too. He takes his responsibilities seriously, which means of course that he threatens Shiba’s position and is torn between the real nature of cult which he knows to be a cynical way of making money by exploiting vulnerable people, and the genuine religiosity of Komamura. To look the part and boost his confidence, he starts undertaking ascetic practices such as bathing in waterfalls and going on long, isolated retreats during which he also fasts. Shiba and Go, meanwhile, stuff their faces at a local Chinese restaurant in an orgy of consumerism.

Kazuo asks Shiba if the believes in god, but Shiba counters him by asking what his idea of “god” is. Kazuo believes that “god” heals the sick and helps those in trouble, but Shiba points out that that’s never actually happened, while at least their made-up religion helped some people, so in a way it’s more godlike than actual god. In any case, Shiba’s god is probably consumerism, but unlike Go it seems he has a degree of uncertainty and entertains the possibility that some kind of god really exists and will punish him for his wrongdoing and lack of faith. When he is attacked and ends up killing someone, Kazuo tells him that it’s his punishment for denying god and chasing after money which Shiba eventually concedes to be true. Nevertheless, the closing scenes find him starting again by reuniting with the previous leader, now dressed as a catholic priest, to offer the same patter about healing miracles while warning about false cults and fake religions. Kazuo, meanwhile, has fully accepted the role of an emissary of god by kicking out Go for not taking the religion seriously while preparing to meet his own apotheosis in a sold out show attended by people who, like he once was, are spiritually lost and ironically looking for something that means more than money in this increasingly empty society.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Video Girl Ai (電影少女, Ryu Kaneda, 1991)

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The thing about video is that it is essentially one-sided. Though it might be possible to achieve the effect of interactivity, the video itself is obviously not responding to the viewer but proceeding along its preordained path. Then again, in the new AI age, interactivity can also be dangerous as chatbots are programmed to say whatever the user wants to hear, even if it ends up encouraging them to do something harmful to themselves or others.

Video Girl Ai (電影少女, Denei Shojo), whose name means “love”, is definitely not artificial intelligence but a sort of video fairy that the hero discovers after encountering the “paradise” video store which is only visible to the pure of heart. The extremely odd proprietor gives Yota (Ken Ohsawa) a videotape he says will heal him following a moment of heartbreak on learning that the girl he fancied, Moemi (Hiromi Hiraguchi), actually has a crush on his best friend Takashi (Naoki Hosaka). Takashi acts cool, but is actually just as diffident as Yota and also has a crush on Moemi. He can’t say anything either, less because he feels bad for Yota than he just can’t muster up the courage.

Nevertheless, he keeps encouraging Yota even if it may be partly to assuage his own fear in not having to deal with his feelings for Moemi. Everyone seems to think Yota is a bit a of a loser and the kids at school have created a pun on his surname to make it sound like he’s called “Yota no luck with girls.” He is indeed awkward. His first date with Moemi goes incredibly badly. Not only is he late because he went to the wrong place, but is overly obsessed with his carefully constructed itinerary which he keeps checking on his electronic day planner. Unable to adapt to the moment, he irritates his date and is finally unable to say how he feels.

Queue Video Girl AI (Kaori Sakagami) who has been sent to comfort him. Thanks to a malfunctioning VHS player, Ai emerges from the TV set a little differently to how she was described on the back of the case. Though she was said to be kind and graceful, Ai is feisty and immediately starts giving Yota what for. After getting to know him a little, Ai begins to develop human feelings and fall for Yota herself, even though she’s supposed to be comforting his broken heart and supporting his romance with Moemi. At this point, she basically finds herself at the centre of a love square as she flirts with Takashi to get him to back off from Moemi so Yota’s romantic fantasy can come true.

Yota, meanwhile, is a classic nice guy but struggles with interpersonal communication and pales in comparison with his ultra-cool friend Takashi. In this case, the TV really can talk back and interact like a real person. Ai is not, however, very familiar with human customs and asks inappropriate questions in public, such as the nature of marriage and sex which she awkwardly says she wants to try out for herself later without knowing what it is. That he has to sort of train Ai opens up a dialogue and gives Yota a means of teaching himself, but despite the fact that Ai has corporeality, there is still a question mark over whether or not she is “real”. Looking at Ai’s imitation flowers, Yota says they’re still pretty even if they’re just pretend, just the like ready meals that Ai starts buying after realising her cooking’s gone to pot because of the damaged VCR. 

Nevertheless Yota struggles with himself. His love is a pure-hearted kind, so he’s firmly rooting for Moemi and Takashi rather than resentful or trying to keep her to himself despite knowing she likes someone else. He’s torn between his growing feelings for Ai and those he had for Moemi while also uncertain how long Ai can stay before her tape runs out. Ironically enough, she’s eventually told that she can’t voice her feelings or risk erasure because her role is supposed to be purely supportive. Erasure is in a way what Yota and Takashi fear. They’re too afraid to voice their feelings in case the girl rejects them. The first ever girl Yota asked out turned him down, which left him vowing never to tell another girl he liked her again. As he describes it, love is conflicting emotions, but thanks to his friendship with Ai, Yota is beginning to find the courage to face his feelings. There’s a minor irony, then, that he may be destined to forget her in the same way as the memories of an old girlfriend inevitably fade, leaving him clinging on to a forgotten ghost of love rather than risk romantic heartbreak pursuing connection in the real world.

Vital (ヴィタール, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2004)

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“There is the vast realm of the unconscious,” one of the professors explains to vacant medical student Hiroshi a soon-to-be physician attempting to heal himself from a trauma he doesn’t fully understand. Perhaps as the title implies, Vital (ヴィタール) sees Tsukamoto branch out from his vistas of urban alienation to find a new paradise in nature albeit one that it exists largely in the mind and that the hero can never fully return to because this place of life is also one of death which exists inside a kind of eternity.

This explains to some extent Hiroshi’s (Tadanobu Asano) temporal confusion. Having lost his memory following a car accident in which he later learns his girlfriend Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto) was killed, he shifts between “reality” and what first seems to be flashbacks of his unremembered past but are actually taking place in a kind of alternate, perhaps idealised reality in the “vast realm of the unconscious” as Hiroshi attempts to reconstruct his image of Ryoko along with that of himself. Another of his professors more philosophically asks were lies the seat of the soul in the human body and is this something that Hiroshi maybe unconsciously looking for during his anatomy classes in which he is coincidentally assigned Ryoko’s body to work on only realising when he sees her tattoo in one of his visions. 

In some ways this grim task of dissection is a bid for greater intimacy, to take Ryoko apart and then put her back together as the students diligently do at the end their studies reassembling the bodies and placing them in coffins in keeping with culturally specific death rituals. The faces of the cadavers are covered with a bag until the students are instructed to remove them, but they are always reminded to treat the dead with dignity and that their role here is one of understanding as they attempt to work out not only how these people died but also how they may have lived. Hiroshi causes conflict with some of his fellow students on just this point, seeming rather creepy in his vacant intensity over the body while also wanting to take ownership over that of Ryoko rather than work as part of the group complaining that the others are too clumsy and it’s affecting his ability to learn. 

Ryoko’s father comes to say that though he once blamed Hiroshi, his daughter had been in a way dead for a long time before she died, the light apparently going out of her eyes when she was still in high school. Only in Hiroshi’s unconscious does she say that she didn’t want to die despite an apparent obsession with death in Hiroshi’s other resurfacing memories/visions of her as symbolised in her repeated requests for him to strange her during in sex. Another of the professors had said that the suppressed desires of the unconscious could create conflict and this alternate reality is also in some senses Hiroshi’s own latent desire for death, to be with Ryoko in this new paradise that is founded on an idyllic beach rich with nature and sunshine where they are free to be together liberated from the oppressions of civilisation. 

Indeed, it’s been raining all through the film as if in expression of Hiroshi’s gloomy mental state but we later learn that Ryoko’s most treasured memory was simply standing in the rain with him and breathing in its scent. Verdant nature is aligned with the vitality that is often absent from the soulless concrete of a city in which everyone seems to exist in tiny, separate worlds which only border on but never join each other. Ikumi (Kiki), a strange female student who develops a fascination with Hiroshi, has an illicit conversation with a professor she’s apparently been sleeping with each of them speaking into mobile phones while standing steps apart. Tsukamoto often isolates the protagonists, placing them in corners or blurring the periphery as if they alone existed in this moment. In Hiroshi’s idealised alternate reality, these barriers disappear as he and Ryoko share an entire world in love and freedom. 

The irony is that he resurrects himself through the process of dissecting Ryoko’s dead body. His Da Vinci-like sketches begin to shift as do the ink-like shadows on the wall amid the reflection of the rain as Hiroshi stares vacantly trying to reassemble his past. Through accepting Ryoko’s death, he rediscovers life and is in a sense reborn insisting he will continue medicine even though his professor and parents advise him not to given what he’s just been through though his parents had also said that before the accident they didn’t really think he had it in him to become a doctor. Their disapproval may explain some of the pressures he was experiencing as perhaps was Ryoko that may have urged them to long for death. In any case, what the film presents is the archaeology of grief, a prolonged period of introspection and loneliness and a seeking of intimacy no longer really possible but discovered only in the vast realms of the unconscious.

Vital is released on UK blu-ray 30th September courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Kubi (首, Takeshi Kitano, 2023)

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Apparently in gestation for a couple of decades, it’s unsurprising that Takeshi Kitano gave himself the role of Hideyoshi in a long-awaited historical drama adapted from his own novel, Kubi (首). Played as an irascible but wily old man, Hideyoshi is the second of Japan’s great unifiers and, unlike his predecessor, died as a result of an illness rather than intrigue. He was also a peasant who rose through the ranks and is perhaps witness to the tumultuous class conflict and social divisions of a hierarchal society.

Even so, in this version of events, Oda Nobunaga (Ryo Kase) too speaks in a thick rural dialect that sets him apart from his retainers and seems to hint at his uncouthness. This Nobugana is an unhinged despot who threatens and humiliates his subordinates, not to mention sexually assaulting them. In short, there’s no real mystery why his men have begun to turn against him and there is intrigue in the court. The film opens with Murashige’s (Kenichi Endo) quickly quelled rebellion which floundered when his reinforcements failed to arrive. Murashige is on the run and Nobunaga has heavily suggested whoever brings in his head will be first in line for the succession, but Murashige is also in a relationship with Mitsuhide (Hidetoshi Nishijima) another courtier vying for favour in more ways than one from the capricious Nobunaga. 

The striking thing about the staging is how like a yakuza drama this intrigue really is with each of the main factions manoeuvring for control, forming temporary or duplicitous alliances forged in the mutual desire of ousting a ruler whose increasing instability presents only the likelihood of a return to chaos. Nobunaga’s flamboyant speech and threatening manner are reminiscent of a yakuza boss on his way out, as is his obvious tactic of setting his rivals against each other while secretly planning to hand the reins to his son anyway. The film takes place in a largely homosocial world, the only women on screen are sex workers and peasants about to be murdered, only this time defined by romantic intrigue in which the various relationships between the men are inescapably linked with power and duplicity.

Mitsuhide’s relationship with Murashige is originally framed as a giri/ninjo conflict, Mitsuhide torn between the exercise of his duty as a samurai and his love for Murashige, only to later be set wondering if Murashige isn’t also playing him in urging him too towards rebellion, while Murashige accuses him of harbouring desires for Nobunaga which would also necessarily be desire for advancement. Advancement is something sought by all and in particular Mosuke (Shido Nakamura), a peasant who is taken on as a foot soldier after looting a battlefield for amour and killing his friend to get his hands on the prize only to realise just at the critical moment how pointless the constant desire for heads really is. The absurdity is rammed home in the closing scene in which Hideyoshi declares himself uninterested in the severed head he asked for, rendering the quest entirely pointless.

This absurdity extends to introducing the character of a comedian who is later killed for talking too much, while Kitano wise cracks his way along as the affable Hideyoshi. Kitano is in his way in dialogue with other samurai epics, using Akira Kurosawa’s horizontal wipes and introducing a pair of bumbling comic relief peasants only to suddenly kill one of them off because at the end of the day this world isn’t very funny. It’s cruel, and mean, and meaningless, so you might as well laugh like Hideyoshi. Residents of a ninja village conduct a festival in which they pray for death and to be released from this earthly torment as soon as possible, while farmers still dream of becoming samurai little knowing the reality of samurai life.

It’s this cycle of futility that is echoed in the opening image of a severed neck into which crabs in a river are crawling. Kitano stages lavish battle scenes, but ones that are often horrifying and absurd, a visceral struggle in mud and blood fought for no real reason. These samurai live their lives on the point of a sword, but they move and behave like yakuza fighting pointless turf wars and games of petty intrigue until someone finally comes for their heads. In the end, the victor is the one who doesn’t play the game at all, but sits and laughs at the absurd cruelty all around them in which the only stable force is ambition accompanied by a nihilistic lust for blood in an already bloody world.

Kubi  screens in New York July 16 as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adrift in Tokyo (転々, Satoshi Miki, 2007)

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An aimless young man finds unexpected direction while walking the streets of the city with an unlikely father figure in Satoshi Miki’s meandering dramedy Adrift in Tokyo (転々, Tenten). These two men are indeed adrift in more ways than the literal, each without connections and seeking a concrete role in life while attempting to make peace with the past. But like any father and son there comes a time when they must part and their journey does indeed have a destination, one which it seems cannot be altered however much they might wish to delay it.

That Fumiya (Joe Odagiri) is aimless might be assumed from his unruly hair and the fact that he thinks tricolour toothpaste might be enough to jolt him out of his sense of despair but is confirmed by his matter of fact statement that he’s in his eighth year of university where nominally at least he’s studying law. His problem is that he’s amassed massive debts to a loanshark, Fukuhara (Tomokazu Miura), who breaks into his apartment and threatens him by shoving a sock in his mouth before leaving with his ID and driving licence. Fukuhara, however, later decides to make him another offer that he will cancel the debt and even give Fumiya even more money if only he will agree to wander around Tokyo with him for an unspecified time until they reach Kasumigaseki where he intends to hand himself in at police headquarters claiming to have recently murdered his wife. 

Like many things that Fukuhara says, it’s not clear whether or not he has indeed killed his wife though Miki frequently switches back to a scene of a woman who seems to have passed away and has been laid out in bed though she shows no signs of having died violently. Her zany co-workers keep thinking they should check on her seeing as she hasn’t shown up in days but something always distracts them and they end up forgetting about her entirely. The body appears to have been treated with love, hinting that if what Fukuhara says is true and this woman was his wife whom he killed in a fit of passion he has quite clearly thought through his plan of action rather than attempting to flee the scene and is perhaps only delaying the inevitable while walking out some other trauma in the company of Fumiya a surrogate son mirroring the description he gives of taking walks in the company first of his father and then of his wife. 

Fumiya deflects every question and agrees that he hates memories having burned his photo albums before leaving for university. He claims that he has no parents, describing the people who raised him as just that, as his mother and father both abandoned him as a child leaving him in a perpetual state of arrest which is one reason he’s still a student four years after most people have graduated. He never went to the zoo or rode a rollercoaster or called a man dad and seems to think of himself as nothing much of anything at all. Yet the fake can sometimes be more real than the real as he eventually discovers becoming part of an awkward family unit with Fukuhara’s “fake” wife (Kyoko Koizumi) he used to accompany to weddings as a paid guest, just beginning to enjoy being someone’s son when Fukuhara decides he’s reached the end of his road. 

There is a sense that everyone is chasing the ghost of someone else or perhaps even themselves, Fumiya finding shades of the father who abandoned him in career criminal Fukuhara who tells someone else that he once had a son who died in infancy, and seeing something of his mother in fake wife Makiko discovering transitory roots in an unlived imaginary childhood. But then there are also occasions of cosmic irony such as a coin locker bag being full not of money but of bright red daruma dolls and tengu noses, or a rebellious street musician meekly bowing to the police. A repeated gag says you’ll have good luck if you spot iconic actor Ittoku Kishibe out and about in the streets, and perhaps in a way Fumiya does in learning to make peace with his childhood self walking with Fukuhara who also comes to accept his failures as a man, a husband, and perhaps a father too. Filled with zany humour and a warmth underlying its melancholy, Adrift in Tokyo is a meandering journey towards a home in the self and a sense of rootedness in the middle of a sprawling metropolis filled with infinite possibility. 

Adrift in Tokyo is released on blu-ray in the UK on 12th December courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Samurai Kids (水の旅人－侍KIDS－, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1993)

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“I’ve always believed that dreams and fantasies have infinite power” an eccentric teacher explains though it might as well be a mission statement for the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi. 1993’s family adventure movie Samurai Kids (水の旅人－侍KIDS－, Mizu no Tabibito: Samurai Kids) draws inspiration from the classic Japanese folktale Issun Boshi about a pint sized warrior who floats off to the city in a bowl, but is at heart a gentle coming-of-age tale as little boy grows in self-confidence and vows to protect Japan’s beautiful natural environment from human mismanagement. 

As his mother (Jun Fubuki) describes him, Satoru (Ryou Yoshida) is a little different and slow to make friends. The confusion he feels is reflected in the persistent fast cutting that adds a note of tension to the otherwise pleasant family home. Like many small boys he is obsessed with collecting mini treasures for his collection along with frogs and insects which is how he comes across a mysterious creature knocked off a log floating in the river by a flying baseball from the game his sister Chizuko (Ayumi Ito) is playing across the way. To his surprise, the bundle of rags Satoru picks up turns out to be a tiny old man in samurai clothes complete with sword who gives his name as Suminoe no Sukunahiko. Sukunahiko (Tsutomu Yamazaki) as he explains had been on his way to the sea where he plans to “evaporate”. The river only flows in one direction after all and you can’t turn back time, everyone dies eventually. 

Having lost his grandfather a couple of years previously (a photo cameo from Ishiro Honda of Godzilla fame), loss is something Satoru hasn’t quite processed though he understands that Sukunahiko has his own path to follow even if he’ll miss him when he’s gone. Nevertheless, he feels a responsibility to look after him so he can recover sufficiently to make his journey to the sea. Through his strange friendship with the tiny old man, Satoru begins to learn more of and draw closer to the natural world. When Sukunahiko’s kimono is pinched by a cheeky crow for some reason continually hanging round Satoru’s home, Sukunahiko is forced to fight him and ends up cutting off his beak but later carves the bird a new prosthetic replacement because no to do so would have been “impolite”. 

Meanwhile a visit to his father’s hometown brings home the realities of contemporary Japan in learning that the area is soon to be sunk as a giant reservoir to prevent the flooding of other nearby villages. On a school trip, Satoru is quick to take issue with some of his classmates who throw their rubbish out of the bus windows as they pass a dam, reminding them they’re being disrespectful to the town that once existed beneath the water. The climax occurs when the children are camping further up the mountain near what Satoru assumes must be Sukunahiko’s “hometown” at the source of the river. It just so happens that the trip coincides with a fading local festival dedicated to the river god which might account for why it’s raining so much. “It’s celebratory rain” an old man explains, “but when people try to control the water it causes problems like this” implying that the water is “rebelling” against humanity’s attempts to channel it. When he and his sister’s frenemy Miyuki are trapped by rockfall, Satoru has to learn to trust the healing properties of water so that he can repay her kindness in protecting him before eventually helping Sukunahiko return to source in the company of his eccentric yokai-obsessed teacher (Tomoyo Harada) and newly sympathetic sister. 

Adapted from a story by Masumi Suetani who also penned the screenplay, Samurai Kids is perfectly suited to Obayashi’s key concerns lamenting that the adults often forget the promises to nature they made while young, Satoru calling out that he’ll protect the rivers and waters of Japan with a warrior spirit like Sukunahiko’s while the Jo Hisaishi score is also reminiscent of the similarly themed movies of Studio Ghibli. Chizuko’s parallel dilemma may be less well explored leaving it unclear whether her tomboyishness is born of discontent over her looks or a part of her essential personality struggling for acceptance in a conformist and heavily gendered society but does at least allow her to find common ground with friend/rival Miyuki who is struggling with something similar stressing the importance of friendship and mutual understanding among the children. It may be the case that the special effects have entered the realms of being classic rather than merely dated but hold up surprisingly well almost 30 years later possessed of their own strange charm yet syncing perfectly with the world around them. A quietly magical tale of loyal yet laidback family cats, parental nostalgia for simpler times, and unexpected friendships between solitary boys and ancient water gods, Samurai Kids is a surprisingly poignant children’s adventure with an important message in its fierce love of a disappearing natural beauty. 

Short clip (no dialogue)

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)