Tag: Japanese indie

Cafune (カフネ, Haruki Kinemura, 2023)

Posted on by

A pair of teenagers with differing priorities struggle to deal with the discovery of an unplanned pregnancy in Haruki Kinemura’s evenhanded indie drama Cafune (カフネ). Refreshingly progressive, the film is careful never to characterise the pregnancy as a tragedy or in anyway shameful but centres more on the decisions it forces the teens to make about themselves and their futures rather than fixating on the transience or longevity of teenage love. 

Love is the answer Mio gives when her mother quizzes her over the pregnancy test she found shoved into a black plastic bag hidden at the back of a drawer. There’s no getting away from the fact her mother thinks she’s been foolish and is disappointed to have found out this way, but at the same time she’s not exactly scandalised and is clear that it’s Mio who has a decision to make both for herself and for her unborn child without trying to influence her either way. As for the baby’s father, Nagisa, he does not react anywhere near as well, suddenly trashing his room and flailing around in frustration even though his own mother has been almost as sympathetic as Mio’s despite a similar level of disappointment with him. Though part of that may be that she knows he’s also been carrying on with Mio’s friend Natsumi which would explain the dirty look she gives him on meeting Mio on the way out as she leaves in a hurry after failing her first attempt to tell him about the baby. 

Mio certainly has a point when she tells Nagisa that he’s immature and self-centred. He’s been bunking off school for weeks while supposedly studying at home for an important exam and seems to have a mild superiority complex. Just as she was going to tell him about the baby he announces that they should take a break so he can study harder, leaving her to handle all of this on her own while also beginning to suspect that he’s been cheating on her which makes her situation all the more difficult. “Am I the only one who’s been irresponsible?” she asks him when he reacts badly to the news about the baby, blaming Mio for this sudden crisis right before his exam as if he had no part in it at all. Mio already seems to suspect that whatever her decision she can’t rely on Nagisa to take responsibility even while making it clear that it’s not something she feels she can decide unilaterally. 

Then again as she later says, maybe happiness isn’t something you can just decide either. The conclusion that she comes to is that she should make herself happy rather than waiting around for someone else to do it for her and even if Nagisa promises to make her happy in the future it’s partly for selfish reasons, as much for himself as for her in proving a point of masculine pride. In any case, the solution which is found is in itself refreshingly mature requiring no particular sacrifice for either party as each is allowed to pursue their individual hopes for the future without resentment or recrimination.

Mio is also able to repair her relationship with possibly treacherous best friend Natsumi who in the end was only jealous fearing that she would lose Mio as a friend now that she has a lover while failing to realise that there is someone else to whom she’s currently “number one”. Largely free of the sense of judgment that often colours teen pregnancy drama, Kinemura’s gentle coming-of-age tale instead discovers an unexpected well of support across the generations as the teens take centre stage in shaping their decisions not just for the present moment but for their mutual futures in figuring out who they are, what they want out of life, and what is best both for themselves and for the baby. Making the most of its tranquil fishing village setting, the film gradually makes its way towards a kind of serenity as the friends play together on the beach beset as it is by roaring waves but also a gentle kind of happiness.

Cafune had its World Premiere as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Long Goodbye (さようなら, Yuuji Nomura, 2022)

Posted on by

“No matter where we go nothing will change” according to a dejected factory worker in Yuuji Nomura’s adaptation of stage play Long Goodbye (さようなら, Sayonara), yet it seems change might be possible no matter where they are if only they had the will to pursue it. Set at a small factory on a small island, the film reflects a sense of small-town ennui but also the concurrent anxiety that even if you managed to escape it life may not be so much better in the city and you’d have lost the illusionary hope that a better life is possible. Still, what each of them learns is that money alone won’t solve their problems but will definitely create a set of new ones. 

The crushing dull nature of life at the factory is rammed home in a looping series of events that begin with Miyazaki (Kouji Kawazoe) and Shibata (Yuuji Nomura) singing karaoke at local bar run by mama-san Tomiko (Kyou Mikamoto) where they appear to be the only customers before waking up early and returning for a group radio taiso session of morning callisthenics. Prone to throwing his weight around, Miyazaki doesn’t like it when Shibata invites co-workers Sueda (Naoyo Ichinose) and Chen (Syunkurou Itoh) to join them but is even more irritated by their refusal. A mousy young woman, Sueda has recently lost her parents in an accident and dreams of leaving the island to pursue a fashion career in Tokyo, while Chen came to Japan from China at 10 years old and has a habit both of comically repeating his name whenever someone else says it and of inappropriately talking about sex workers and masturbation at every given opportunity.  

The crisis occurs when Sueda and Chen discover that their boss has been fiddling his taxes and has a large amount of cash stored on the premises because he obviously can’t deposit it in a bank. Realising that he couldn’t go to the police if someone robbed him, they decide to steal the money and are eventually forced to rope Miyazaki and Shibata in to help by keeping their boss drinking at the karaoke bar while they carry out the heist. 

Of course, nothing quite goes to plan partly because Chen is a bit of a loose cannon but also because none of them are really the heist-planning sort and they have no idea what they’re doing. Sueda double-crosses Miyazaki and Shibata by leaving with all the cash while she and Chen take a taxi to Osaka station to realise when they get there they’ve missed the last train. Meanwhile, Chen has also stolen a watch from their boss’ home which places them all in danger as it gives him an opportunity to go to the police without necessarily revealing his tax evasion operation. The money represents for each of them the possibility of changing their lives or at least of leaving the island and its dearth of opportunities, but as Sueda keeps cautioning Chen you also have to know how to use it to best achieve your dreams. 

Shibata is seemingly the only one who’s more or less happy with his life as it is, constantly reminding the others that actually their lives are fine as they are, unable to understand their sense of desperation and resentful of having his life messed up by their unrealised desire for change. He challenges Sueda that the money is an irrelevance because if she really wanted to change her life she could have done it on the island but she counters him with her feelings of insignificance certain that no one really cares about her or would notice if she tried to change herself. No one can be fully satisfied with their life, he warns her, perhaps suggesting he thinks she’s asking for too much and is simply existentially restless which isn’t something she could cure through crime and a sudden flight to the city. After all, she didn’t earn the money herself, she’s just stolen it from someone else which isn’t a particularly good foundation for self-reinvention. 

After being accused of plotting the crime, Miyazaki is then forced to face his own feelings of dissatisfaction, which his arrogant belligerence was intended to cover, along with his frustrated romance with Tomoki who like everyone else just wants to run away hoping that Miyazaki will finally pay off his tab when they get the money. His attitude changes to the extent he offers to bow down to Shibata in exchange for assistance, but he similarly asks him if he really wants to change or is going to settle for his small-town existence too afraid to take the risk of gambling on something better. Their boss cautions Shibata that finding the meaning of life might not be a good thing if you end up discovering that all that awaits you is death, but it seems some do begin to find new direction thanks to their failed heist even if it’s not necessarily the direction you’d expect. 

Long Goodbye screened as part of the 2022 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Torso (トルソ, Yutaka Yamazaki, 2009)

Posted on by

A traumatised woman overcomes her sense of loneliness by sharing her life with a limbless inflatable doll in the aptly named Torso (トルソ). More than a treatise on urban disconnection, the directorial debut from Yutaka Yamazaki is both an exploration of the lingering effects of childhood trauma and a contemplation of contemporary womanhood, the changing relationship dynamics between men and women, and the extent of bodily autonomy in an often conformist society while ending on a note of ambiguity which may represent either liberation or resignation. 

34-year-old Hiroko (Makiko Watanabe) works at an apparel studio where she is among the older of the employees and somewhat aloof with her colleagues, declining invitations to hang out after work or attend the singles mixers one of the other girls is forever organising. She is indeed the sort of person who likes to keep her distance, ostensibly preferring her own company spending her time working on a patchwork quilt but secretly cuddling up at night with a slightly smaller than life-size inflatable male torso which is anatomically correct yet has no head, arms, or legs and into which she must herself breathe life only to let it out again later. Her only other real connection is with her younger half-sister Mina (Sakura Ando) who is her polar opposite in terms of personality, a bubbly, energetic woman who seems to crave the kind of contact her sister is largely unable to give her. 

Even so despite claiming to hate having other people in her space, Hiroko is indulgent of Mina always giving in and allowing her to stay at her apartment at one point for an extended period of time even if not entirely happy about it. While Hiroko has eschewed male contact for the 100% controllable union with the torso pillow, Mina is trapped in an abusive relationship with a man, the otherwise unseen Jiro, whom we later learn to have been a long term boyfriend of Hiroko. Theirs is a relationship frustrated and defined by unresolved resentments, Hiroko complaining that Mina always takes everything she treasures beginning it seems with her mother’s love. A colleague of Hiroko’s around her own age laments that at their age weddings and funerals are the only occasions that they visit their hometowns, but Hiroko is reluctant to visit for reasons other than the usual awkwardness between grownup children and their parents, dressing up and catching a train to attend the funeral of the stepfather we gather must have abused her while her mother (Miyako Yamaguchi) turned a blind eye but finally unable to go through with it. 

For Hiroko’s mother, Hiroko is the embodiment of her resentment towards her first husband who left her, later on another visit snapping back that she must have got her “unpleasant personality” from him while otherwise praising Mina who admittedly has bad taste in men but a generous heart. Hiroko meanwhile projects her own resentment onto her mother who failed to protect her from abuse she wonders possibly because of the resentment she feels towards her while she also projects her feelings of jealous inadequacy onto Mina who may also in a sense resent her for being unable to return the sisterly affection she desires. As she replies, she took Hiroko’s things because she only wanted her love even if vicariously through the otherwise abusive relationship with Jiro whose child she is also carrying. 

In many ways it’s Mina’s pregnancy which forces Hiroko to reassess her life, not least in the accusation that she had wanted to carry Jiro’s child herself. At 34 Hiroko is perhaps at a moment of crisis, her frosty mother coldly telling her she’ll soon have to “give in” and abandon her solitary life for a conventional marriage (despite her recent widowhood her mother has already started another affair with the guy from the funeral parlour). On the other hand, are men actually very necessary anymore or has true independence become not only viable but a respected choice? Despite the constant mixers, some of the younger women at the office have decided not to wait for marriage and have already put a foot on the property ladder getting a good deal on a mortgage by starting young to own their own place and achieve financial independence. “You can’t rely on men these days” one of others agrees while recognising that choosing this kind of independence does not necessarily mean a rejection of romance or long term relationships. 

For her part, Hiroko is wary of men who do in the main seem to be sleazy and predatory, visibly flinching as an over-friendly clerk at the car rental office repeatedly attempts to lean across her while she’s sitting in the driving seat. Aside from its obvious insentience, the torso is symbolically unable to harm her in having no arms to strike, no legs to kick, and no head to hurt while preserving the part she most craves buried in its empty chest which she cradles constantly like a child with a favourite toy. Her attachment to it is not purely physical but emotional, taking it on a mini holiday to the beach dressed in a pair of tiny speedos as they frolic in the sea together alone on a private beach. Yet even this body as empty as she feels her own to be can also betray and be betrayed, another treasure to be stolen if only in the breaking of a spell on realising that Mina has discovered her secret. 

Mina’s final decision is both old-fashioned and ultra-contemporary, vowing to go back to the country and raise the child alone while in a symbolic sense becoming her mother in intending to take over her old part-time job at a nursing home. Hiroko meanwhile is preoccupied with the idea that she’s sacrificing her dreams and aspirations because of something that’s essentially Jiro’s fault, in part stripping her of her own agency in making her decisions and imposing on her the view that struggling in the city even if it doesn’t really suit you is inherently better than making a simple life at home. A brassy gravure model (Sora Aoi) who makes a point of the fact her body is business similarly looks down on Mina, suggesting that she’s simply weak and if she really wanted to pursue her dreams she’d have an abortion without a second thought. Yet does it really need to be an either or? The decision that Hiroko finally comes to may suggest that it might, or then again perhaps she’s merely freeing herself of her long held trauma and looking to lead a more emotionally fulfilling life. “We’re just starting out” Mina shouts back from from across the ticket barriers as she leaves hinting at new beginnings for each of the sisters having each at least laid something to rest. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Piece of Atom (アトムの欠片, Takuya Koda, 2021)

Posted on by

A teenage boy attempts to come to terms with grief following the sudden death of his parents in Takuya Koda’s nostalgic youth drama, Piece of Atom (アトムの欠片, Atom no Kakera). Quite clearly influenced by the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi, Koda’s summertime drama contemplates transience and eternity in insisting that nothing’s ever really gone forever and that we leave traces of ourselves wherever we go that may be picked up by anyone able to discern them. 

Teenager Ryo is very into science and particularly interested in the nature of the atom. He lives with his parents and much older sister Shiho in a small flat in Tokyo, but when his mother and father are killed in a car accident he is forced to move to a house the family owned in the country which is in a state of disrepair. At around 30, Shiho does her best to create a stable environment for her brother as they work together to repair their home but there’s also strange ethereality in her behaviour that suggests she’s trying to prepare him for an early adolescence. 

Neither of them seem to know very much about their parents’ pasts or why it is they have this house which obviously has not been visited in many years. Yet soon after his arrival, Ryo begins to encounter a strange phenomenon in which he almost breathes in floating memories of his father which begin to illuminate the parts of his parents’ lives which had remained hidden from him. He attributes this to the presence of his father’s “atoms” which he shed while, as Ryo discovers, he lived in the area as a student. Later he comes to the realisation that some of his father’s atoms survive in him as well as in everything he ever touched or came into contact with and that he might also posses the atoms of famous historical figures forever connecting him to the great confluence of humanity comforted by the knowledge that his parents did not simply disappear from the world and parts of them will forever remain within it. 

Meanwhile, he’s also a city boy trying to adapt to life in the country. His first shock is that his school is so small that there are no grades, all the children are being taught together. In any case he quickly makes a friend with local boy Ken, who shares his love of tokusatsu hero “Woodman”, setting up a secret base for them both in an abandoned car on a local dump. Ryo fights with his sister over personal privacy, irritated by her tendency to tidy his room without warning like any teenage boy might be, while struggling to define his idea of family now that there are only two of them. Before he died, Ryo had wanted to ask his father who had penned a book on the subject why atoms are round and how they hold together only to get a partial answer through one of his visions which is echoed by Shiho’s explanation that it’s his feelings which hold her together as if his unwillingness to let her go literally binds her atoms in their current form. 

Yet as she also points out, atoms may be eternal but people are not and she cannot stay with him forever. Echoing the work of Nobuhiko Obayashi, Kudo’s dialogue is often theatrical and self-reflective, while he makes surprising use of green screen and special effects to lend a note of unreality to the world around Ryo as he embarks on a journey of self-discovery across a timeless and nostalgic summer. The atoms he refers to are less physical particles, though clearly that too, than fragments of memory littered over a landscape as a kind of proof of life. Like a snail trail of human existence, they are evidence of the traces left behind by those who have gone allowing Ryo to come to a greater understanding of his parents while learning to let them go in order to move forward with his life. An affecting coming-of age-tale, Kudo’s occasionally psychedelic drama repurposes the atom as an embodiment of memory and feeling, a force that preserves its integrity while allowing its young hero to find an accommodation with loss through the contemplation of eternity. 

Piece of Atom screened as part of the 2022 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Enma-san (えんまさん, Tomoki Suzuki, 2022)

Posted on by

A young woman with the ability to see people’s true thoughts thanks to a magic mirror becomes consumed with hatred for the world’s duplicity but finds unexpected connection with a girl who never lies in the stylish debut feature from Tomoki Suzuki, Enma-san (えんまさん). Named for the Japanese god of hell, the film finds the emo heroine looking for an escape from a nihilistic existence in which nothing and no one can be trusted but rather than salvation finding only further despair in realising even she may not be exempt from the curse. 

17-year-old Ema lives alone with her mother and mostly keeps to herself at school. Sometimes people try to befriend her and she concedes they’re kind, but there’re also “liars” mostly trying out of pity. Since coming into possession of a mirror which looks just like that of the great god Enma, she’s been confronted by the gap between what people say and what they really think unable to put up with such moral duplicity. But then she comes across a young woman who looks perfectly normal in the usually warped vision of her mirror. It is as she says love at first sight. Realising Seira is being badly bullied by her classmates, Ema resolves to do something about it, not least because she thinks people who are honest should be rewarded and Seira doesn’t deserve to be treated so poorly. 

Indeed, with her strong sense of justice, Ema comes to take on the form of Lord Enma himself vowing to punish and eradicate liars starting with Seira’s bullies. Yet in meeting her there’s something in Seira which seems to soften her resolve. Though she had shunned the human world, Ema gradually begins to warm up to it while spending time with Seira who perhaps isn’t quite as honest as she’s made out to be but has managed to find an accommodation with an acceptable level of deception. Ema refuses to wear makeup because it’s like pretending to be someone else while becoming anxious about the idea of touching up the photos they had taken in a sticker booth at the arcade because it means they’re altering the truth of the image. Seira meanwhile corrects her pointing out that her makeup is barely noticeable, while even if the photo is inauthentic the memory it represents is not. She even convinces her to eat a slice of cake at a cafe, a place she ordinarily wouldn’t go and food she wouldn’t usually eat as it would be made by liars. 

Then again there’s a healthy amount of self-deception going on with Ema as she finds herself sinking into the persona of Lord Enma, threatening to cut out people’s tongues and eventually embarking on a dark and twisted path towards nihilistic violence disguised as justice. But then not quite everything is as she assumes it to be, later discovering Seira may not be quite as honest as she first thought and has troubles of her own with overbearing perfectionist parents whose approval she is so desperate to gain that she’s even willing to cheat. The connection between the two women, be it friendship or something more, is genuine yet they are to some degree on opposing sides while the tension inside Ema threatens to turn her into that which she most hates in the ambivalence of her emotions. 

Divided into chapters through a series of elegantly designed title cards, Suzuki’s cool colour palette bears out the loneliness and resentment of Ema’s nihilistic world view brightening only when she’s around Seira, while occasionally shifting into Ema’s mirror vision in which the world becomes blurry amid the unreality of so many liars. Yet as she’s told towards the end by a sympathetic policewoman lies are a normal part of human nature and may even be essential to a well functioning society, the tragedy being that Ema is not aware of her self-delusion until fully forced to face herself and the confusion of her feelings. Still for a few brief moments she discovered how “comfortable and pleasant” it could be trusting other people even if it turns out somewhat ironically that her trust, if not perhaps her faith, may have been mistaken. 

Enma-san screened as part of the 2022 Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Light of Spring (ひかりのどけき, Fumito Fujikawa, 2022)

Posted on by

“The more we try to be a family the more we feel like strangers” a husband laments reflecting on the pressures of the contemporary society which seem to have stretched his marriage possibly to breaking point. Starring a cast of non-professional actors, actually a real family living in the suburbs of Tokyo, Fumito Fujikawa’s neorealist drama The Light of Spring (ひかりのどけき, Hikari Nodokeki) examines the effects of familial breakdown largely from the perspective of the couple’s young son Shui (Shui Hirabuki) as he struggles to process the changes in his life and the indefinite absence of one parent or another. 

As the film opens, the father (Masana Hirabuki) hugs his infant daughter, Chikasa (Chikasa Hirabuki), while the mother (Yuki Kimura) gets her son, Shui, ready for an outing repeatedly asking him if he is able to do things for himself such as zip up his jacket or put on his mask as if preparing him for an early independence. She puts a backpack on his shoulders and tells him dad is taking him somewhere nice, but when the pair get back she and Chikasa will be gone. Something has obviously gone wrong in the parents’ relationship and the mother is taking Chikasa with her to the grandparents as the couple embark on a trial separation. 

The majority of the rest of the film focusses on the boy and his father adjusting to life alone as little Shui attempts to process what’s happening thinking that perhaps his mother has just gone away somewhere temporarily and will return in a few days. Indeed, his father does not tell him concretely that she won’t be coming back, just that he doesn’t really know if or when meanwhile they leave the baby gate in place even though there’s no baby around each of them stepping over it to access the kitchen and the balcony. Dad tries to make it fun, spending additional time with his son, but also discovers the pressures of being a single parent having to rearrange his working life in order to accommodate picking him up from school. Even so as he later admits to him the trial separation is working out in his favour. Without apologising he explains in simple terms that he feels trapped by the responsibility of fatherhood and is coming to believe perhaps it’s better if he and his wife do not continue to live together. 

The mother meanwhile is beginning to feel the opposite, asking her own mother if she often fought with her father and getting a fairly typical answer wondering if perhaps they’re overreacting and should try and find a new way through together. Where dad shuts down Shui’s questions, he even wondering at one point if Chikasa is still alive, she is more mindful on the effect on the children returning home when Shui calls her from a public telephone and taking him back to the grandparents only for him to then miss his dad. Dad meanwhile thinks he needs more time to decide, uncomfortably admitting that he likes it better with fewer responsibilities but perhaps in the end also missing his family.  “I wonder what a family is supposed to be” mum sighs, “we’re becoming more and more like strangers” as the pressures of the contemporary society along with the pressing anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic distance them ever further from each other. She remains at the table, but the father tells her to go with increasing intensity as if making clear that he no longer wants to have this discussion and means to exile his family from his life continuing to live in the family home marked as it is by a sense of absence while they remain displaced temporarily housed with the grandparents. 

Shot in the classic 4:3 of retro home video, Fujikawa’s neorealist drama captures the everyday life of a contemporary family with its trips to the park, museums, and burger bars or just cooking together at home but also hints at the anxieties which come with it exacerbated by the existential anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic. “Nothing’s unbreakable” the father admits, “but I’m sad when they break” the boy complains. “Even if you take good care of things, some things still break” his father goes on to explain in what seems like more of a life lesson than might be expected in a discussion about a worn-out pillow. Even so perhaps they don’t break all the way, as the hopeful conclusion implies set amid the pretty cherry blossom not quite in full bloom in a quiet corner of an otherwise busy city. 

The Light of Spring screened as part of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2022

Switchback (スイッチバック, Shunnosuke Iwata, 2022)

Posted on by

Really, everything in life is a learning experience but how should you feel if something that you thought was quite profound and serendipitous was actually engineered even if the way you reacted to it wasn’t? The young heroes of Shunnosuke Iwata’s Switchback (スイッチバック) find themselves caught in a moment of confusion uncertain how far they should trust the adult world while equally at odds with each other and trying to figure out what it is they may want out of life. 

Brazilian-Japanese teenagers Arham and Chiemi are attending a summer workshop project along with basketball enthusiast Suzuka while her childhood friend Eiichiro never actually shows up. Led by Tokyo influencer Rei, the kids will be working together in order to produce a video of a ball bouncing through the countryside. By reversing the footage to make it seem as if the ball is on its own little adventure she hopes to create a sense of the uncanny and with it a new perspective. Arham doesn’t quite get the point of it, but participates anyway and ends up forming a special bond with an old man in a wheelchair they encounter who has a hobby of flying drones. Yet when he finally arrives, Eiichiro claims to have seen the old man walking around and accepting something from Rei assuming he must be some kind of stooge and the children’s adventure they’ve all been on since has been a setup. 

Arham is very invested in the old man’s story and outright rejects Eiichiro’s suggestions that he isn’t “real”, carrying out an investigation into everything he told them about a former airfield that had been built in their town during the war and was later bought by a media company for recording aerial footage. What he discovers is that all of that seems to be true save for one crucial personal detail the old man had mentioned, leaving a grain of doubt in his mind while he continues to resent Eiichiro despite being unable to come up with a reason as to why he would lie. Eiichiro is in fact not quite telling the whole truth though he’s right about the old man, engaging in a kind of engineered adventure of his own but later offers the explanation that adults too are often frustrated and they may have tried to “destroy” Arham because they’re jealous of his cheerful and openhearted nature. 

Even though he concedes that he still experienced what he experienced for himself after meeting the old man, developing an interest in drones and learning a lot of local and aviation history, Arham is uncertain how he should feel about being manipulated, disappointed on trying to confront Rei and hearing exactly the same speech as she’d used in her influencer videos explaining her approach to life and art aiming to give young people a head start in gaining new experiences without them realising that they’re being taught something even if she doesn’t otherwise attempt to push them in a particular direction simply provide the catalyst for growth. Chiemi experiences something similar when she’s offered the opportunity to become a model, a skeevy older man repeatedly telling her she is suited to the work and may have a promising future, adding that she has a quality of ferocity that “Japanese” kids don’t while she complains that she dislikes being told what does and doesn’t suit her preferring to do as she pleases whether other people think it suits her or not. 

Suzuka meanwhile quietly struggles to fit in on her own having come to the town only eight years previously hinting that she and her family may have moved in the wake of the 2011 earthquake but stating only that she doesn’t like to talk of it either traumatised or fearing stigmatisation. Unity came first security second she claims of her basketball team reflecting on the positivity she experienced as they came together before a match in the face of their opponents. The kids perhaps do something similar as they each in their own way react to adult duplicity while deciding to take it in their stride embracing the experiences they’ve had as their own. Rei’s social experiment could easily have backfired leaving them cynical and indifferent, unwilling to believe in or pursue anything fearing that there is no objective truth only manipulation but in they end they run the other way, deciding to trust each other and themselves while creating new experiences of their own. Produced in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the town of Obu in rural Aichi Prefecture, Iwata captures the beauty of the local landscape along with the natural openness it engenders in allowing the children to become fully themselves as they ride their own individual switchbacks to adulthood.   

Switchback screened as part of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2022

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Angry Son (世界は僕らに気づかない, Kasho Iizuka, 2022)

Posted on by

A resentful young man struggles to orient himself amid constant xenophobia and social prejudice in Kasho Iizuka’s sympathetic coming-of-drama Angry Son (世界は僕らに気づかない, Sekai wa Bokura ni Kizukanai). At a difficult age, he flails around lashing out at all around him without fully comprehending the consequences of his actions, but eventually comes to understand a little more about his mother’s past, his place in Japan, his relationships with his extended family, and his possibilities for the future while searching for the father he has never really known save for a name on his maintenance payments. 

Jun’s (Kazuki Horike) main source of resentment is towards his mother, Reina (GOW), a Filipina bar hostess by whom he feels emotionally neglected while unfairly blaming her for the discrimination he faces for being mixed ethnicity. The pair live incredibly modestly as Reina sends all her money back to her family in the Philippines even telling Jun to use his child support payments to get the electric turned back on if it bothers him that much, leaving Jun feeling as if he isn’t really included her definition of “family” or that perhaps she resents him as a burden that causes her to hold back even more of her pay. That’s one reason that he becomes so irate on coming home one day and unexpectedly finding an unfamiliar man in his pants in their living room only to be told he’s his mum’s new boyfriend, Mr. Morishita, who will be moving in the week after next because they’re getting married. Granted, this is not an ideal way to find out about such a drastic change in his living circumstances but Jun just can’t accept it, fearing firstly that Reina is after his money only to discover to his further bemusement that Morishita is also unemployed.  

News of his mother’s impending wedding has Jun feeling even more pushed out than before, especially when Reina confirms that if he’s forcing her to choose she’s going to choose Morishita and he’ll have to fend for himself. Meanwhile, his high school boyfriend Yosuke is already talking up the possibilities of marriage seeing as their prefecture has recently brought in a same sex partnership scheme. Though Yosuke excitedly talks it over with his supportive parents, Jun is noticeably sullen replying honestly that he really isn’t sure if it’s a such a good idea mostly because he doesn’t want Yosuke to get “dragged” into his ever increasing financial responsibilities to his extended Filipino family. Like many of the other kids, Jun has left his careers survey blank and it’s his refusal to think seriously about his future that eventually disrupts his relationship with Yosuke. 

In response to all of these crises, he decides to try tracking down his birth father whom he has never met a quest which takes him through a series of Filipino hostess bars across their largely rural area and eventually to a man, Watanabe, who was once married to “Loopy Lisa” as she was then but is not actually his dad. Even so, Watanabe begins to open his eyes and change his perspective on his mother’s occupation for which he had previously looked down her beginning to understand the sacrifices she is making not only for her family back home but for him too and that while her love may be difficult for him to understand it is not absent. Meanwhile, she too faces prejudice and discrimination on more than one level, a co-worker at a part-time job at a bowling alley she took while laid off from a bar struggling in the post-corona economy expressing openly racist sentiment even in front of their boss, and from the local council when she tries to apply for rent relief which she is denied on the grounds that those working in the “adult entertainment” industry are not eligible for benefits. 

Reina gives as good as she gets and refuses to let discrimination slide, but Jun finds it all quite embarrassing and is carrying a degree of internalised shame which later leads her challenge him on his fragile sense of identity that he too looks down on her as an inherently dishonest foreigner just like any other prejudiced Japanese person no different from her unpleasant colleague or the kids at school who’d bullied him for being half-Filipino, gay, and the son of a bar hostess. Confronted with his own bad behaviour and gaining a new perspective thanks both to Mr Watanabe and Morishita whom he realises is sensitive, kind, and genuinely cares for his mother he begins to envisage a future for himself only to have his horizons broadened once again when Yosuke introduces him to a young woman at the school, Mina, who is asexual but wants to raise a family and is looking for another kind of partnership that hints at a new evolution of the family unit. 

A willingness to embrace the idea of family and of being a part of one himself marks Jun’s passage into adulthood, coming to an understanding of his mother and her relationship with her family in the Philippines and willing to take on the responsibilities of a committed relationship in mutual solidarity and support. A highly empathetic coming-of-age tale, Angry Son never shies away from societal issues such as widespread xenophobia, homophobia, bullying, prejudice, and discrimination but eventually allows its enraged hero to discover a new sense of confidence in his identity in order to forge his own future in a sometimes hostile environment. 

Angry Son screened as part of Osaka Asian Film Festival 2022

International trailer (dialogue free)

Images: ©2022「世界は僕らに気づかない」製作委員会

Body Remember (ボディ・リメンバー, Keita Yamashina, 2021)

Posted on by

“It’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s not.” according to the hero of Keita Yamashina’s twisty take on meta noir, Body Remember (ボディ・リメンバー). For him, the superficial, literal truth is perhaps less important than that which it conceals, hoping to expose the buried reality hidden between the lines in the novel he is attempting to write inspired by a story narrated by his infinitely unreliable femme fatale cousin Yoko (Yume Tanaka). Shifting between an apparently concrete “reality” that is perhaps exposed as anything but by the final scene, dreams, memories, and the act of creation, Yamashina hints at collective fantasies and the essential truth of sensation as his artist hero attempts to turn an enigma into art. 

An unsettling presence, Yoko strides into a cafe dressed in a vibrant red and proceeds to explain to novelist Haruhiko (Takaya Shibata) and his artist girlfriend Ririko (Momoka Ayukawa) that she has long found it difficult to distinguish reality from dream, believing in a sense that the “truth” is irrelevant. Her story seems to be a rather ordinary if tawdry one of finding herself at the centre of a love triangle but also feeling like a third wheel as if she were a puzzle piece hovering over empty spaces unsure where to land while the men are comfortably installed in their rightful places. When lawyer Jiro (Ryuta Furuya) turns up at the bar she has been running with husband Akira (Yohei Okuda) and mournfully explains he suspects his wife is having an affair, the trio reassume an intimacy from their uni days which is later broken by a passionate embrace between Jiro and Yoko accidentally witnessed by the betrayed Akira. 

Playing with images of sex and death, Yoko also recounts that seeing Jiro loosen his tie provoked in her a powerful urge to strangle him with it. Yoko apologises for scaring Haruhiko, but on the contrary he seems to find it arousing later openly telling Ririko that he too is captivated by Yoko while she complains that Jiro and Akira, now (or perhaps always) characters in a novel, are underwritten foils who exist only for Yoko. Haruhiko in a sense agrees, but also pulls focus and makes his potential story, in fact the story we have been watching, about the two men, foreseeing a conclusion which is all manliness and honour tinged with a frisson of homoeroticism that joins them both in the inevitable death foreshadowed in the opening scene. 

Yet Ririko wants to know the truth of it, investigating the bar where Yoko claimed to work and discovering that no such establishment ever existed though the location was recently used by a shady cult. Perhaps jealous, she dreams of an intimate encounter between the smitten Haruhiko and his “sexy” cousin, yet later reflects on her own tendency to run away from reality in flights of fancy. Her revelations perhaps provoke a deeper intimacy with her conflicted boyfriend who finds himself attempting to construct an “authentic” narrative from unreliable testimony, but then again we can’t be sure everything we see is real as the couple engage in a surreal game of beach volleyball with two men resembling Akira and Jiro whose behaviour is strange and childlike if displaying a similar intimacy to that which they appear to share in Haruhiko’s nascent “novel”. 

Challenged by Ririko, Haruhiko merely disappears his heroine, avowing that in the end she was never important in his story about the ambiguous relationship between two men turning her into a mythical femme fatale while Ririko continues to sketch her rival in an attempt to figure her out. Yoko herself tells us that she sees no real distinction between dream and reality that one is no more true or important than the other while insisting that while her mind may forget the facts, the sensation is recorded in her body which will always “remember” if indistinctly. 

Using a cast of mostly theatre actors, Yamashina crafts an unsettling atmosphere founded on tactile sensuality that belies the frequent unreliability of verbal communication while the jazz score and shadowy photography contribute to the sense of noirish dread complete with wafting cigarette smoke and a fatalistic, morally ambivalent conclusion. Further disrupting our sense of reality with a final self cameo, Body Remembers nevertheless reminds us that the truth is less important than our perception of it just as it returns us to where we started even less certain than before. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ton-Kaka-Ton (トンカカトン, Teppei Kohira, 2020)

Posted on by

“Life’s meant to be enjoyed, right?” the fun-loving uncle at the centre of Teppei Kohira’s Ton-Kaka-Ton (トンカカトン) tries to convince his grumpy nephew, but it’s a difficult lesson to learn for a young man apparently so overburdened with loss. Set in a small fishing village in rural Fukui, Kohira’s quiet coming-of-age tale is as much about familial reconnection and paternal legacy as it is about frustrated futures, but is in essence the story of a moody youngster learning to carve a life for himself in which he can stand alone.

19-year-old Nobu has just started work with his uncle Shinji at the local boathouse. Having lost his father at some unspecified point in the past, Nobu remains sullen and uncommunicative apparently not altogether excited about his new job heading off to the workshop alone rather than waiting for his uncle to pick him up. Shinji wanted to hold a party to celebrate Nobu getting a job, but he tries to wriggle out of it and then sits in the corner staring at his phone rather than joining in. He is perhaps a little irritated by the whole thing, feeling railroaded by his well-meaning uncle into an occupation he might not have chosen while also belittled in feeling as if he’s not actually allowed to do very much because he’s still only in training and Shinji keeps stopping him from trying anything complicated. Matters come to a head when Shinji sends him out on a private errand during work hours, driving his aunt to her regular hospital checkup for a heart condition but Nobu, apparently fed up, throws her out of the truck in the middle of the highway and then drives off leaving her behind. Whichever way you look at it, this is unjustifiably irresponsible behaviour, but is all the more galling when Shinji is forced to reveal that he asked him to take her, in part, because he has recently learned he is suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer and has only a few months at most to live. 

Of course, Shinji is in part hoping that Nobu will continue to look in on his aunt seeing as they have no children of their own and he quite plainly positions himself as a surrogate father to Nobu following his brother-in-law’s death. Nobu, however, is moody in the extreme and actively resists fathering, apparently irritated by his uncle’s admittedly large personality. Shinji works hard and is an accomplished craftsman, but he also likes to have a good time and is, in Nobu’s eyes, irresponsible, always adding to his tab at the cafe run by an old school friend who knows him too well to expect any better while continuing to smoke and drink knowing that it can hardly make much difference now. Other than his wife, Shinji’s main worry is that he won’t be around to finish teaching Nobu everything he needs to know for the future or continue guiding him towards a more settled manhood. 

Perhaps for these reasons, Nobu’s mother suggests that he temporarily move in with with his uncle and aunt so he can spend quality time with him while he’s still around, much to Shinji’s excitement and Nobu’s chagrin. Nevertheless, enforced proximity does perhaps begin to bring the two men together, Nobu eventually scrubbing his uncle’s back at the local baths in a typically filial gesture. “It’s actually quite painful, and that’s proof of life!” Shinji ironically exclaims, though Nobu continues to struggle with his anxiety over his uncle’s illness, cruelly berating him that if he weren’t ill they wouldn’t all be suffering. There’s a kind of projection in his charges of “selfishness” and “self-obsession” as he continues in his sullen denial and resentment, only latterly bonding as Shinji imparts the rest of his remaining knowledge including the proper technique for a hammer and chisel chipping away at his moody facade.

“Learn what you can by watching others” he eventually tells him, as much a reminder to be present in the world as a workplace instruction given in the knowledge he is running out of time. Learning to accommodate loss, Nobu perhaps also comes to appreciate not only absence but legacy, accepting what his uncle left behind in the form of his teaching feeling less abandoned and alone than reconnected with family and history yet also carving his own path as he prepares to move forward into a more settled adulthood.

Original trailer (no subtitles)