Tag: Japanese

VIDEOPHOBIA (Daisuke Miyazaki, 2019)

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(C)VIDEOPHOBIA PARTNERS

How can you really be sure who you are when your image of self is entirely dependent on external validation? In this brave new age of video technology, none of us are any longer custodians of our own image, we leave impressions of ourselves everywhere we go and most particularly online where anyone and everyone is free to do with them as they please. Intellectually, we all know this already. We use the internet ourselves, not always responsibly, and have become so used to seeing CCTV cameras on every street corner that we no longer register their presence. We live our lives under observation, but even so the realisation that our image has been captured without our knowledge can be a profound violation. 

So it is for Ai (Tomona Hirota), a permanently exhausted young woman who has returned to her Osaka home after failing to make it in Tokyo (or rather, as she points out, Kanagawa). Ai is currently taking acting classes while making ends meet with a side gig as a shopping mall mascot (another masked role). She spends her nights smoking while wearing a face mask and making anonymous connections with strangers via cybersex websites. That is until she goes on a rare night out with some people from acting class and meets a handsome man in a bar (Shugo Oshinari) who tells her that it’s too early for names before taking her back to his improbably swanky apartment for a one night stand. Ai notices that there’s a strange looking camera pointed at them from a nearby shelf but thinks nothing of it, and after rather mechanistic sex clasps hands with her new lover as if an intimate connection has finally been forged. 

It’s therefore a double shock for her when she spots a mysterious video on a porn website which appears to have been shot in the apartment where she spent the previous night. Pressing play her worst fears are confirmed, a sex tape featuring Ai and the guy from the club seems to have been uploaded online. She tries to confront him and is told that the camera is a vintage 8mm model for display purposes only which contains no film and admittedly would be very difficult to process. Confused, she leaves, but is even more disturbed when more videos start appearing online which could not have been taken by the static camera on the shelf. She then discovers that the guy has vanished, the apartment wasn’t even his but is being illegally sublet on Airbnb by a company registered in Indonesia. 

That last piece of info Ai gets after going to the police to whom she gives her name as “Park”. Though the policewoman is sympathetic enough and never directly judges Ai, she’s embarrassed to have to explain that she went home with a guy whose name she still doesn’t know and has no other evidence except the video site. Trying to be reassuring, the policewoman reminds her that there are billions of hours of video already online so the chances of someone seeing hers are extremely small and, in any case, they don’t even think it looks like her in the video anyway. 

Rather than reassured, Ai becomes even less certain. If that isn’t her in the video, then who is she? She takes the police up on their recommendation of a support group but finds it a bizarrely uncanny experience in which each of the other participants tells a near identical story about an ex posting an old photo on social media which contributed to the failure of their present relationship. The support group mirrors her acting class in which an abrasive director instructed them all to take on personas which were the opposite of their own, literally swapping identities. Pushed into a corner, one of the students eventually snapped and attacked the teacher whose intense approach was, according to some, also an act designed to elicit the best performance. 

If we’re all “acting”, and our image is susceptible to theft, then what really can we say constitutes our “identity” in the digital age? The support group is fond of chanting that “You haven’t changed” hinting at an essential presence that exists outside of immediate perception, but everyone in the support group is verging towards some kind of creepy group think defined by “shared” trauma. In the end, Ai resorts to desperate measures, literally taking control of her image by changing it, but can she really be said to have escaped herself and should she even want to? Wearing the face mask eerily reminiscent of Eyes Without a Face, she gazes out of her balcony window and thinks she sees “herself” walk past on the street below. Thanks to the powers of technology we have made division of ourselves, no longer the primary hosts of our own image. 

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Good-bye (グッドバイ, Aya Miyazaki, 2020)

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“The things you learn as a child stay with you” admits a melancholy nursery teacher, lamenting that perhaps her life would have turned out differently if only her parents hadn’t been so easy going. Most people probably wind up wondering something similar, who they might have been if their parents had or hadn’t made the choices that they made on their behalf, but sooner or later you have to leave childhood behind and take responsibility for yourself. 

That’s the part that the heroine of Aya Miyazaki’s Good-bye (グッドバイ), 20-something Sakura (Mayuko Fukuda), is currently having trouble with, struggling to find a way forward largely because in one sense everything comes too easy for her and life is no kind of challenge. Privately, however, she’s caught in an adolescent dilemma pining for the father who, it seems, has been largely absent from her life since leaving the family when she was small. 

The crunch comes when Sakura abruptly quits yet another boring office job just because it didn’t light her fire. Her mystified friend who can’t really believe someone would just quit their job on a whim in Japan’s competitive employment environment just because it was dull (let alone make a habit of it), suggests she fill in at a daycare centre that another friend has just vacated leaving them in the lurch and with a temporary contract available. Sakura is unconvinced seeing as she has no childcare qualifications, but is persuaded on hearing the facility is “unlicensed” and therefore not fussy. She doesn’t exactly take to it right away, but beginning to bond with the children reminds her of her more innocent self, especially once she encounters the father of one little girl, Ai, who is often the last to get picked up. 

Sakura is taken with Mr. Shindo (Kohei Ikeue) because he looks a little like her dad and also smells of the same brand of cherry-scented cigars that he used to smoke. It also doesn’t help that his family situation closely resembles a mildly traumatic incident from her own childhood in that Ai’s mum seems to be temporarily absent from the family home for unclear reasons. Sakura finds herself playing mother, brushing Ai’s hair and tying it up in pigtails the way her father couldn’t quite master on his own. Running into the pair in the street, she even finds herself cooking dinner for them, giving Ai a few lessons in peeling carrots, while accidentally stepping into the space vacated by another woman and perhaps crossing a line with the extremely awkward Mr. Shindo. 

The encounter does, however, prompt her into a long delayed conversation with her sympathetic mother (Asako Kobayashi) who offers no explanation for why she did what she did, or sees any need to apologise, but is perhaps touched by some of her words which convince her that her daughter needs a final push to help find her place in the world. Prompted by the other teacher at the nursery, Sakura asks her mother why she sent her to all those after school clubs etc, only to be told that she did it because she wanted Sakura to find her passion but though she was good at everything, Sakura always quit after only a few weeks. Her mother wonders if that’s because when everything is easy for you you have no incentive to stick with it and never get the opportunity to become invested. 

That has perhaps been Sakura’s problem, she says goodbye too early before there’s any possibility of getting attached. Bonding with the kids reminds her of the little girl she once was, processing the sudden absence of her mother and the possibility of her familiar world ending. Her mother eventually returned, but perhaps gave her an incomplete sense of security in the feeling that she would never leave her or the house, while her father is of the opinion that the family photo was something best left behind in the family home which was no longer his. In learning to say “good-bye” to Ai, Sakura learns to bid farewell to the little girl she once was, insecure and afraid of rejection. As her mum tries to hint, it’s time for her to find a place of her own, no longer so afraid to stick around past the part where everything seems too easy.

Good-bye screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival.

Kontora (コントラ, Anshul Chauhan, 2019)

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Copyright © 2020 Kowatanda Films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tezuka’s Barbara (ばるぼら, Macoto Tezka, 2019)

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The relationship between an artist and his muse (necessarily “his” in all but a few cases) is at the root of all drama, asking us if creation is necessarily a parasitical act of often unwilling transmutation. Osamu Tezuka’s Barbara (ばるぼら), brought to the screen by his son Macoto Tezka, takes this idea to its natural conclusion while painting the act of creation as a madness in itself. The hero, a blocked writer, describes art as a goddess far out of his reach, but also the cause of man’s downfall, framing his creative impotence in terms of sexual conquest that lend his ongoing crisis an increasingly troubling quality. 

Yousuke Mikura (Goro Inagaki) was once apparently a well regarded novelist but has hit a creative block. While his friends and contemporaries are winning awards and national acclaim, he’s become one of “those” writers busying himself with potboilers and eroticism to mask a creative decline. Passing a young woman collapsed drunk in a subway, something makes him stop and turn back. Surprisingly, she begins quoting romantic French poetry to him, and actually turns out to be, if not quite a “fan”, familiar with his work which she describes as too inoffensive for her taste. Mikura takes her home and invites her to have a shower, but later throws her out when she dares to criticise an embarrassingly bad sex scene he’s in the middle of writing. Nevertheless, he’s hooked. “Barbara” (Fumi Nikaido) becomes a fixture in his life, popping up whenever he needs a creative boost or perhaps saving from himself. 

Strangely, Barbara is in the habit of referring to herself using a first person pronoun almost exclusively used by men, which might invite us to think that perhaps she is just a manifestation of Mikura’s will to art and symbol of his destructive creative drive. He does indeed seem to be a walking cliché of the hardbitten writer, permanently sporting sunshades, drinking vintage whiskey, and listening to jazz while obsessing over the integrity of his art. We’re told that he’s a best-selling author and previously well regarded by the critics, but also that he has perhaps sold out, engaging in a casual relationship with a politician’s daughter and cosying up to a regime he may or may not actually support. He’s beginning to come to the conclusion that he’s a soulless hack and the sense of shame is driving him out of his mind. 

Mikura’s agent Kanako (Shizuka Ishibashi) certainly seems to think he’s having some kind of breakdown, though the jury’s out on whether her attentions towards him are professional, sisterly, or something more. There isn’t much we can be sure of in Mikura’s ever shifting reality, but it does seem a strange touch that even a rockstar writer of the kind he seems to think he is could inspire such popularity, recognised by giggling women wherever he goes yet seemingly sexually frustrated to quite an alarming degree. His world view is an inherently misogynistic one in which all women seem to want him, but he can’t have them. A weird encounter in a dress shop is a case in point, the assistant catching his eye from the window display turning out to be a devotee of his work because of its “mindlessness”, something which annoys Mikura but only causes him to pause as she abruptly strips off for a quickie in the fitting room. Tellingly, the woman turns out to be an inanimate mannequin, literally an empty vessel onto which Mikura can project his fears and desires, which is, perhaps, what all other women, including Barbara, are to him. 

Yet who, or what, is Barbara? Chasing his new “muse”, Mikura finds himself on a dark path through grungy subculture clubs right through to black magic cults, eventually arrested on suspicion of drug use. There is something essentially uncomfortable in his dependency, that he is both consuming and consumed by his creative impulses. Inside another delusion, he imagines himself bitten by potential love interest Shigako (Minami), as if she meant to suck him dry like some kind of vampire succubus, but finds himself doing something much the same to Barbara, stripping her bare, consuming her essence, and regurgitating it as “art”. Either an unwitting critique of the various ways in which women become mere fodder for a man’s creativity, or a meditation on art as madness, Barbara seems to suggest that true artistry is achieved only through masochistic laceration and the sublimation of desire culminating in a strange act of climax that stains the page with ink.  

Tezuka’s Barbara screens in Amsterdam on March 6/7 as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Moonlit Winter (윤희에게, Lim Dae-hyung, 2019)

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It goes without saying that the world is very different now than it was 20 years ago, but change happens slowly and primarily benefits those who come later rather than those trying to live as it’s happening. The two women at the centre of Lim Dae-hyung’s Moonlit Winter (윤희에게, Yoon-hee-ege) are a case in point, painfully separated and forced into self-isolation born of internalised shame while perhaps filled with unspeakable longing. In a sense, they each live within that moonlit winter, a cold and lonely place yet not without its beauty. 

In Japan, an older woman, Masako (Hana Kino), mails a letter she finds lying around in her niece’s room, unsure if she’s doing the right thing but perhaps hoping for a kind of shift. Presumably, Masako cannot read the contents of the letter as they’re written in Korean (though later read to us in Japanese), and addressed to a “Yoon-hee”. It’s Yoon-hee’s daughter Sae-bom (Kim So-hye), however, who first picks it up and begins to realise, perhaps for the first time, that her rather distant, lonely mother is a woman too with a painful past she knows nothing of. Written with a kind of melancholy finality and the sincerity of a letter never quite intended to be sent, the heartfelt words hint at a past heartbreak in which the author, Jun (Yuko Nakamura), hopes that she won’t make the recipient uncomfortable but felt that she had to write to let her know that she still thinks and dreams of her after all this time. 

Finally receiving the letter, Yoon-hee (Kim Hee-ae) is not “uncomfortable” or at least in the way that Jun had feared she might be. Recently divorced after years of unhappy marriage to a drunken policeman (Yoo Jae-myung), Yoon-hee has a job in a canteen at a factory and lives alone with her teenage daughter who is in the last year of high school and preparing to head off to university in Seoul. Intrigued by the letter, Sae-bom begins to become curious about why her mother is the way she is. She tries asking her uncle, but he’s fantastically unhelpful, and then questioning her father but he only tells her that her mother is the kind of woman who makes others feel lonely. That strikes Sae-bom as ironic because she chose to stay with her mother after her parents’ divorce precisely because she thought she seemed the lonelier.

Jun, meanwhile, is a lonely figure too but perhaps wilfully so. She tells her aunt Masako with whom she’s been living all this time that she chose to come to Japan with her father after her parents split up because he didn’t care about her (hence why she’s always lived with the unmarried aunt), while she was all her mother ever cared about. In retrospect, it sounds as if, as she said in the letter, she ran away, afraid that her mother would notice something in her she did not want to be noticed. Perhaps Masako has noticed something too which is why she sent the letter, though she’d never bring it up directly. A well-meaning though tone deaf and entirely insensitive relative (Sho Yakumaru) tries to use the occasion of her father’s funeral to talk Jun into a blind date with his Korean friend, an offer she flatly refuses but he keeps badgering her anyway. Eventually she stops the car and insists on walking home at which point he realises you probably shouldn’t be matchmaking at a funeral but she cuts him off again, telling him that’s not the reason for her intense annoyance but stopping short of explaining what is. 

Jun has one of those faces, slightly mysterious, pensive as if she’s about to say something important but never actually does. Another woman (Kumi Takiuchi) thinks she recognises that quality in her and edges towards a kind of confession but Jun shuts her down, brutally telling her that the only secret she’s keeping is being half-Korean, advising that if she too has a “secret” she’d best keep it to herself. Even more than Yoon-hee, Jun has lived a life of isolation, too afraid to be her real self and terrified of being seen. 

But for the younger generation things are perhaps different. Sae-bom is at a romantic crossroads of her own, acknowledging that her high school romance may be about to end seeing as nice but bland boyfriend Kyung-soo (Sung Yoo-bin) is not exactly her intellectual equal and cannot accompany her to a university in Seoul. After realising that the sender of the letter is female, Sae-bom seems unfazed, still curious about this hidden part of her mother’s life and rooting for her to find a kind of happiness. In the habit of taking photos (using a camera which turns out to have been a present given to Yoon-hee as an apology from her mother for the family’s belief that there was no point in sending a girl to university) Sae-bom declares that she only photographs beautiful things rather than people, but takes photos of her mother all the time, capturing her at her most mysterious but rarely smiling. Railroaded into a life of conventional success that eventually failed, Yoon-hee has become an empty, directionless shell unable to live her own life while filled with an internalised sense of shame that leaves her feeling guarded and worthless.

Yet through the arrival of the letter she begins to reconnect with her younger self, her repressed desires, and impossible longing for Jun. With the gentle support of a daughter and aunt respectively, the two women begin to rediscover the courage to live, not necessarily in embracing romance, but accepting themselves for who they are and rejecting the sense of shame that has defined each of their lives. The winter may at last be ending and they may not yet have it in them to ask for the stars, but they’ll always have the moon. 

Moonlit Winter screens in Amsterdam on March 6/8 as part of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mrs. Noisy (ミセス・ノイズィ, Chihiro Amano, 2019)

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“Cases involving two parties must be viewed from differing angles” according to a lawyer trying to point out why a case that was cast iron days before is now a non-starter. Most of us know it’s a bad idea to judge people on appearances, but few of us have made the leap to acknowledging that it’s wrong to judge people at all, especially when you don’t and can’t know what’s happening in other people’s lives. Being self-involved is hardly a crime, but if it’s a bad quality in a human being it’s an unforgivable sin in a writer, which is why the heroine of Chihiro Amano’s Mrs. Noisy (ミセス・ノイズィ), apparently inspired by an early viral video phenomenon, is struggling to overcome a nasty case of writer’s block. 

Some years ago, under a pen name, novelist Maki (Yukiko Shinohara) made a name for herself with an award-winning book. After giving birth to her daughter, Nako (Chise Niitsu), she swore motherhood wouldn’t slow her down but six years later she’s published nothing of note. After moving to a new apartment with her freelance musician husband Yuichi (Takuma Nagao), Maki hopes to kick her writing career back into gear but an immediate spanner is thrown in the works by a strange noise early in the morning that turns out to be the old woman next-door furiously beating her futon. Maki asks her to stop, but her impatience only gets her neighbour’s back up and starts an ongoing conflict that only worsens after Nako, feeling neglected by her mother’s dedication to her work, wanders off and the neighbour, Miwako (Yoko Ootaka), accompanies her to the park. 

Later, we’re shown things from Miwako’s point of view and realise that when she said there were “reasons” she was out beating a futon at 6am she was telling the truth. Not only that, she tried to explain but was abruptly cut off by an impatient Maki who was not in the mood to listen. It doesn’t help that the Japanese word for “bugs” also means “ignore”, but many of the upcoming problems could have been resolved with a little more patience and politeness, which is something Maki decided she didn’t need to bother with in deciding not to go around introducing herself to her new neighbours as is the usual custom.  

Likewise, when Yuichi abruptly announces he can’t watch Nako the following day as planned, it’s easy enough to think he’s being unreasonable, letting his wife down and implying his career’s more important than hers, but that rather ignores the fact that his explanation is perfectly reasonable in that freelancers cannot (in contrary to popular opinion) dictate when and where they work, and that he offers to keep Nako occupied that evening instead so Maki can meet her deadline. As time wears on, we start to doubt Maki’s sense of subjectivity, realising that she’s begun to blame all of her problems on the old woman next door whom she doesn’t even really know. 

Of course, there are other conflicts, social and generational differences. To a woman of Miwako’s age, it seems “common sense” for an older woman to look after a little girl who seems lonely, in the same way it seems “common sense” that’s it’s wasteful to throw out perfectly good food just because it’s slightly misshapen, but then the world is not as accepting of “common sense” as it likes to think it is. To Maki, a younger woman not used to living in a tight knit community, it seems inappropriate to take someone else’s child to the park without checking with them first. Admittedly, Nako’s claim that Miwako’s husband (Taiichi Miyazaki) gave her a bath (not quite what happened) also sets alarm bells ringing, as perhaps it should, but again could have been settled with much less acrimony if it weren’t for an unfortunate personality clash between the two women in which Miwako offers some “common sense” advice that Maki herself is to blame for her daughter wandering off, touching a nerve in Maki’s conflicted sense of maternity that sees her cruelly firing back and drawing something of a battle line. 

Perhaps unpredictably, Yuichi sides with Miwako, pointing out that whatever Maki says, the fact remains that Nako wandered off because she felt neglected. Maki’s mother (Yuki Kazamatsuri) tells her that she needs to pay more attention to her husband and family, be more of a “wife” and make an effort with the housework, which sounds like old-fashioned sexism and perhaps it is but there’s also truth in it in that Maki really is only thinking about herself. Her editor too tries to guide her to a self-realisation that will reinvigorate her writing career, but she remains blinkered and obtuse. Maki decides Miwako is a batty old woman, and takes bad advice from her get rich quick cousin (Masanari Wada) to use her as a model for a story which becomes a big hit with a new, younger editor who selects it as a serialised column in a magazine for young people where its snarky mean-spiritedness finds a natural audience. Her cousin even uploads a video of the two women comically fighting on the balcony which goes viral and sends sales through the roof. But the meanness of the new, online world is something which cannot be controlled and can have terrible, unforeseen consequences when ordinary people become the focus of malicious rumour and painful ridicule. 

Even so, Maki takes a long time to see the light. She bristles when her editor tells her that her work is shallow, but fails to understand that the cause of its shallowness is her own unwillingness to engage with the world around her. “Following the surface of things is pointless” he tells her, only by taking the time to understand others can she write with true authenticity. Maki assumed Miwako was a horrible old woman after seeing her swipe offerings from a roadside shrine, only to later realise that she in fact replaces them every day (and perhaps it was her who put those cute little clothes on the statues to keep them warm). You can’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives, but if you don’t take an interest eventually people will stop taking an interest in you. 

Mrs. Noisy screens as the Opening Night movie of this year’s CinemAsia Film Festival on 4th March where the director Chihiro Amano will be in attendance to present the film.

Farewell to Dream (夕やけ雲, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1956)

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Does adulthood mean the death of dreams, or simply accommodation with disappointment? Yoichi (Shinji Tanaka), the cheerfully romantic hero of Keisuke Kinoshita’s Farewell to Dream (夕やけ雲, Yuyake-gumo), has made his peace with “losing” out in the great game of life, comforting himself in working hard to provide for others while becoming good at what he does, but keeping one eye always on the past and the boy he once was whose horizons were boundless and future untethered. 

In his chipper yet somehow poetic opening monologue, 20-year-old Yoichi introduces us to the family fishmonger’s he runs with his mother. If he says so himself, standards have improved since his father’s day and he’s done quite well for himself. His mother even jokes about finding him a wife, but that’s a long way off. To show us how he got here, he picks up his binoculars, a present from an uncle who sailed away and never came back, to show us “the last chapter of his youth, full of innocent dreams”. At 16, Yoichi dreamed of becoming a sailor, staring out over the horizon and catching sight of a beautiful woman in a distant window far on the other side of town. He lives with his parents and three younger siblings, while his older sister Toyoko (Yoshiko Kuga) has an office job that supplements the family income seeing as there’s not much money in fishmongering. 

Yoichi describes his sister as beautiful yet cold. No one can quite believe such a fantastic beauty was born to a lowly family of fishmongers with a back alley shop in a small town, but her beauty has made her cruel and avaricious. She wants out of poverty and she doesn’t much care what she has to do to escape it. She knows the easiest way, and in real terms perhaps the only way, is to attach herself to a man of means, which is why she’s just agreed to marry a man named Sudo (Takahiro Tamura) who comes from a wealthy family and is head over heels in love with her. When he tells her that his family business has collapsed and he’s no more money, she abruptly calls the engagement off and begins courting her widowed boss, eventually marrying him despite the fact that it’s a second marriage and he’s more than twice her age. 

Toyoko may just be playing the only cards she’s been dealt, but she’s also a personification of selfish post-war individualism. She only cares about herself, has no real sense of morality, and a total disregard for the feelings of others. Sudo, who for some reason truly seems to have loved her, cannot let her go, turning up on her wedding day to punch her in the face. Toyoko is fully aware of the effect she has on men and skilled in manipulating it, drifting back into an affair with Sudo even after her marriage, leaving her irate husband forever ringing her parents with orders to return her to her new home as if they had any real influence over her. 

Despite himself, Yoichi is by contrast the “good son” who gives up the right to his individual future to take care of his family. At 16, he hates being a fishmonger’s boy because the other kids tease him that he always smells of fish, as if he can’t wash away the scent of poverty. He dreams of freedom as a sailor out on the wide ocean, forever staring at the horizon with his binoculars, and of the beautiful woman who, he decides rather romantically, must be suffering with some kind of illness which is why she’s always in her room. When his father becomes ill, suffering a heart attack brought on by Toyoko’s harsh words, Yoichi begins to realise that his dreams are dying. Like the fish in his shop, he’s trapped, no longer able to swim free but tethered to the ground. There can’t be anything more of life for him than becoming a fishmonger himself, whether he liked it or not. His fate was sealed before he was even born. 

Yet unlike the flighty Toyoko who seems unhappy in her marriage but doing her best to put up with it by continuing to do as she pleases, Yoichi has made peace with warmhearted practicality. At 16 he lost everything – his father, the image of Toyoko, his younger sister fostered out to a badgering uncle, his best friend, the beautiful woman in her lonely room, and finally the horizon and his dreams. “His dream was as fleeting and as beautiful as the clouds at sunset” the opening text tells us, echoing the film’s title with a poetic melancholy that makes plain that Yoichi has not so much abandoned his dream as made the memory of it a part of him, a relic of another time when all was possible. Still, in essence perhaps it’s only what it is to grow up, an acceptance of shrinking horizons and that dreams are by definition things destined not to be, but that’s it’s OK in the grand scheme of things because that’s just the way life is. Forced to become a fishmonger, Yoichi becomes the best fishmonger he could be, and even if he does so with a heavy heart, he has a lightness in his step in knowing he does it not for himself but for those he loves. 

Titles and opening (no subtitles)

The Perfect Game (完全な遊戯, Toshio Masuda, 1958)

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In the mid-1950s, Nikkatsu had courted controversy with a series of films depicting the amoral excesses of the immediate post-war generation. The “Sun Tribe” movies embedded themselves in a world of new bright young things who were largely independently wealthy and thoroughly bored by the ease of their lives. Nikkatsu was forced to halt production on the Sun Tribe films after only three (Toho and Daiei added one each of their own), but they did precipitate a wholesale shift towards youth movies which became the studio’s signature theme. 

Best remembered for his contributions to Nikkatsu’s action noir, Toshio Masuda’s The Perfect Game (完全な遊戯, Kanzenna Yugi, AKA The Tragedy of Today) arrived two years after the Sun Tribe craze but neatly picked up the baton dropped by Kon Ichikawa’s Punishment Room in its tale of nihilistic college boy amorality. As the film opens, our four heroes are playing mahjong and lamenting their lack of funds. They are all, it goes without saying, middle class boys largely supported by their parents who, as far as we know, are high ranking salarymen. They are not hungry, or worrying about how to pay rent or tuition, they are just bored and want extra money to go out having fun before they they are forced into the corporate straightjacket with the regular salaryman jobs many of them already have in the bag thanks to the tremendous power of nepotism. 

As the the opening text implied, they viewed their money making exploits as a game, proving how clever they think they are in getting one over on the universe, but all too quickly it spirals out of control. Toda (Yasukiyo Umeno), the ring leader, has come up with an ingenious money making scheme. It turns out that there’s an illegal betting office some distance away from the bicycle racing stadium that keeps taking bets until someone rings from the track and tells them who won, which means there’s about a five minute delay between the winner being declared and bets being called. The boys figure that if they can somehow beat the lag they can win big. To make it work, they ask their “friend” Kazu (Masumi Okada), who they seem to regard as a bit dim, to join them as well as recruiting an old codger to call the race before the boards go up. Surprisingly it works out, but unfortunately the yakuza-backed bookmaker, Matsui (Ryoji Hayama), wasn’t banking on such a big win and doesn’t have the funds to pay out in one go. 

Toda in particular is pissed off. The wind taken out of his sails, he’s not sure what to do which is when So (Akira Kobayashi), the pretty boy of the group, suggests an ironic punishment. Matsui had joked that he’d put up his adorable kid sister Kyoko (Izumi Ashikawa) as collateral if he couldn’t pay out, so why don’t the boys take him at his word and kidnap her. Rewinding a little, these snotty college boys are about to become kidnappers, adding a little blackmail on the side. This isn’t a fun game anymore, someone is going to get hurt whatever happens even if they can’t know the extent to which their plan to earn a few bucks to blow on jazz bars and pool rooms is going to incur collateral damage. 

Unlike the boys, Kyoko is a working class girl. She wants to keep her head down and work hard, not quite approving of her brother’s involvement with the yakuza and wishing he’d find an honest job but also acknowledging that he had few options and it’s his job at the bookies that’s been keeping them all this time. Their father died in the war, and their mother (Yumi Takano) is very ill, bedridden with heart trouble. Kyoko is no innocent, she brushes off So’s attempts to court her by revealing that dozens of creepy guys try the same thing every day, and most of them don’t stop at passing notes. For whatever reason she ends up warming to him, making him take her to a theme park while her mother worries at home, while he also begins to feel conflicted about the plan in falling for her for real. 

So’s mistake is the childish belief that they’re still playing a game and everything will be alright in the end. He foolishly trusts that his friend’s are men of honour and that Matsui will come up with the money and redeem his sister in no time at all. But money’s not easy to come by even if you’re a yakuza, and the boys might not want it anyway if it comes with additional complications. Visiting with Kyoko’s sickly mother, he perhaps begins to see the gap between his comfortable existence and theirs of constant struggle. He’d been so proud to tell Kyoko that he had an interview lined up at a big company because of family connections, but when he arrives there he feels irrelevant. The interview board only ask him questions about his dad, as if he didn’t really exist. Finally they ask him to talk about what he did at uni, what his “passions” are, if he did anything of note in the past few years, perhaps even fall in love? They’ve unwittingly touched a nerve, but So is in any case forced to reflect on the meaninglessness not only of his adolescence, but of his future. This interview has been a farce, but they’re giving him the job anyway because he’s his father’s son. What more is there to say?

The other boys are also worried about their job prospects, concerned that someone might talk and they’ll be forever tarnished by “youthful exuberance”, refusing to take any personal responsibility for the consequences of their “perfect game”. Unlike So they still want to live in that inherently unfair world which exists for upperclass men to do as they please. Toda and So weren’t quite like their friends. They felt conflicted. Toda embarrassed to be borrowing money from his girlfriend but rejecting the others’ belief that you don’t have to pay women back, only to angrily bark at her that there’s “no way a woman can understand” the intensely masculine debate he’s just had with So about responsibility, which he accepted by deflecting in pushing So’s complicity back on him in an attempt to share his guilt. Unlike the Sun Tribe films, youth takes responsibility for itself and its friends, but can find no way to atone for its moral abnegation. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Balloon (風船, Yuzo Kawashima, 1956)

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The uncertainties of the post-war world are often conveyed through the familiar “cloud” metaphor, but in characteristic fashion Yuzo Kawashima opts for something earthier in the manmade “Balloon” (風船, Fusen). Less representative of its troubled humanists than the amoral villain Tsuzuki (Hiroshi Nihonyanagi) who likes to know which way the wind is blowing so he can go that way too, these balloons are up in the air because they’re afraid to land fearing the inevitable pop if they pick the wrong spot.

Our hero, former painter Murakami (Masayuki Mori), has become the head of a successful camera firm. His son, Keikichi (Tatsuya Mihashi), works with him, while his 20-year-old daughter Tamako (Izumi Ashikawa) is a reluctant student still living in the family home. Out of step with his times, he’s known as a decent and compassionate boss, offering his staff a significant wage increase in excess of that recommended by the union just because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. Unfortunately, Keikichi is much more like his conservative mother and does not quite share his father’s egalitarian principles. He’s currently engaged in a “relationship” with widowed bar hostess Kumiko (Michiyo Aratama) but treats her extremely badly, throwing money on the side table as he leaves her apartment to make it clear that he views himself as a customer and not as a lover. When Murakami re-encounters a family friend, Tsuzuki, at his father’s funeral it sets off a chain of events that will change his life completely. Now a shady nightclub entrepreneur, Tsuzuki is dead set on making his singer, Mikiko (Mie Kitahara), a star and thinks a good way to help make that happen might be to get her married to someone with money, like, for instance, Keikichi. 

Raised in Shanghai, singing in French, and forever wearing berets, Mikiko may indeed be the face of avaricious post-war youth, apparently having floated along with Tsuzuki halfway across the world in search of a place in the sun. Urged on by her manager, she goes to war against Kumiko who, in contrast to the “bar girl” image, is earnest and naive. Working as a hostess places her on the fringes of the sex trade, but does not necessarily imply that she makes a living by sleeping with her customers, and she certainly seems less than grateful to receive money from Keikichi whom she believes to be her boyfriend. Mikiko willingly weaponises her sex appeal and seemingly endures no consequences for doing so, while Kumiko is roundly rejected as a “fallen woman” and deemed an unsuitable match by Keikichi’s snooty mother. 

Tamako, by contrast, actively reaches out to Kumiko and attempts to make her a member of the family, never for a second considering that she might not be welcome because she can see that Kumiko is a “nice” person. Much more like her kindly father, she finds herself uncomfortable at home and mostly holes up in the attic painting. After suffering childhood polio, she’s been left with muscle weakness in her left arm and is treated like a child by her mother and brother who openly tell people that the illness has also made her “simple”. Despite all that, however, she sees only the best in people and desperately wants those around her to be happy. 

The difference in her own family is brought home to her when her father takes her with him on a business trip to the much quieter, more traditional Kyoto where he has reunited with a pair of youngsters whose late parents once rented him a room when he was temporarily displaced by post-war confusion. Like Kumiko, Rui (Sachiko Hidari) is a kind person in difficult circumstances. She too is working in a bar and has done some work as a photo model, even glamour shots to earn money to pay her brother’s university fees. Rui doesn’t want to go on doing that in the future, but doesn’t feel too bad about it either because she only exposed the outside of herself, and really who cares about that. 

Beginning to regret some of his life choices, Murakami wonders if he mightn’t be better to move back into the attic room in Kyoto and pray at the temple everyday like before instead of trying to make money he feels has slowly corrupted his family. Confronted with Keikichi’s near sociopathic self-involvement over his relationships with Kumiko and Mikiko, he comes to the conclusion that all he can do is cut him loose and hope he learns some humility through being forced to stand on his own two feet. Given a talking to by his father Keikichi doubles down with his misogynistic world view, insisting that “all women are whores” and all relationships are essentially transactions while claiming that he, himself, as well as men in general, is the real victim because he’s being forced to carry the can for the way the world works. Murakami isn’t having any of it, calmly asking him if he’d say the same thing to his mother, which he sheepishly admits he couldn’t. 

Mikiko likens Tsuzuki to one off his metaphorical balloons, pointing out that he was an imperialist in Shanghai and now seems to have it in for the bourgeoisie, but for all his cynicism he seems to have a kind of admiration for a woman like Kumiko who carried on loving one man no matter how poorly he treated her. If only he had a woman like that, he might have found a place to land and his life would have been very different, he muses. Murakami, meanwhile, has rejected the modern city, certain that his son is the way he is because his life has been too easy and access to wealth has given him a superiority complex that’s put him out of touch with ordinary people. Disappointed with his own family, he decides to make a new one with the two cheerful youngsters in Kyoto, hoping that he will at least be able to save his daughter from the ravages of a rapidly declining society which seems primed to swallow the sensitive whole.

Currently available to stream on Mubi in the US.

Death Row Woman (女死刑囚の脱獄, Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)

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How far does freedom extend in the complicated post-war society? Best known for his eerie horror films, Nobuo Nakagawa takes a stab at B-movie crime in a tale of wronged femininity as a woman’s attempt to escape her father’s authority ends in a death sentence. Death Row Woman (女死刑囚の脱獄, Onna Shikeishu no Datsugoku) sends its wrongfully convicted heroine on the run, literally, from a cruelly patriarchal society, but there is something quite perverse in its ambivalent conclusion which at once frees and vindicates but also suggests that perhaps daddy knows best after all. 

As the film opens, patriarch Imai (Hiroshi Hayashi) is engaging in a bonding ritual with his prospective son-in-law, Aoki (Keinosuke Wada), teaching him how to hunt. Meanwhile, his daughter, Kyoko (Miyuki Takakura), has wandered off with another man, Soichi (Tatsuo Terashima), with whom she is in love. Soichi is obviously worried about Aoki, but she tells him that the marriage is her father’s idea and she’s no intention of going through with it, not least because she is pregnant with Soichi’s child. The pair embrace, engaging in a clinch in the woods, but are spotted by Kyoko’s step-sister, Minako (Yasuko Mita), who apparently doesn’t like someone else hunting what she’s got her eye on, pointing her shotgun right at the loved up couple before her mother (Fumiko Miyata) arrives and knocks it out of the way sending a shot into the air in the process. 

Soichi is a spineless sort of man, telling Kyoko that he “can’t talk to old people” and refusing to go with her to see her father. She’s confident Imai will have to give in seeing as her pregnancy makes this a fait accompli, but he tells her to get an abortion and if she doesn’t like it she can get out. Imai wanted her to marry Aoki because he picked him out as a son, an heir to leave his company to. As Kyoko points out, he never considered her feelings, only seeing her as a tool to be manipulated for his own ends in securing his business interests. Imai objects to Soichi not only because he resents having his authority undercut, but because Soichi is a “nobody” and he finds the idea of his daughter marrying someone from a different social class distasteful in the extreme. All of that is about to become moot, however, because seconds after Kyoko storms out vowing to marry Soichi even if it means severing ties with her family, Imai drops dead, not of an apparent heart attack as it first seems but of poison! As the last person to see him alive and with the entire household having heard their row, Kyoko is arrested for her father’s murder and sentenced to death. 

Jumping on over a year, Kyoko’s son is seven months old and apparently living in a children’s home rather than being cared for by any of her family while she languishes in prison still proclaiming her innocence. Nakagawa flirts with woman in prison tropes, putting Kyoko in a room of four women including a predatory lesbian, but eventually allows her to find female solidarity with a “habitual criminal” who helps her escape in order that she might prove her innocence and be reunited with her son. Kyoko’s decision to escape is prompted by an awkward visit from Soichi who has neglected to bring the picture of their baby he’d promised her while claiming to be working hard on her case. He tells her that he’s engaged a lawyer who has turned up evidence implicating Aoki who has made several attempts of his own to visit her all of which she has turned down. Unbeknownst to her, he’s even transferred to the town near the prison and is living in a company dorm not too far away. Coming to the conclusion that Aoki is the architect of all her misfortune, she determines to pay him a visit and either get a confession or take her own life. 

Aoki, however, turns out to be a good guy after all. He didn’t kill Imai and has been living near by because he’s sure Kyoko didn’t either and is determined to crack the case. Aoki helps her hide from the authorities and manages to get her on a train to Tokyo daringly defying the police dragnet, while the case’s original investigator begins to smell a rat in staking out the Imai home. Soichi seems to have become awful close with the two Imai ladies, so perhaps he really was the odious social climber old Imai feared him to be. So far, Kyoko’s attempts to take charge of her own future in rejecting her father’s authority have not gone well. She has ended up with a death sentence for daring to challenge the social order by advancing her own agency and has escaped from the literal prison, but is once again locked up for her own safety while Aoki does all the investigating on the outside. Her desire to reassume her role as a mother to a child technically born out of wedlock is what eventually gets her caught, leaving her at the mercy of the magnanimous police who, thankfully, decide that the duty of law enforcement is to act in the best interests of justice, admitting their mistakes rather than covering them up to save face. 

So, Aoki turns out to be good and Soichi bad. Kyoko is vindicated, proving herself innocent of the crime of patricide, but is punished fiercely for her attempt to escape her father’s control. It’s tempting to think that the message is that her father knew best after all and if she’d only done as she was told and married Aoki without making a fuss all of this could have been avoided. Amoral post-war ambition has been unmasked, everyone has been shuffled back into their original class boxes with order seemingly restored. Kyoko has “escaped” her imprisonment, but is she truly “free”? “That’s all in the past now”, Aoki reassures her, “but hang on tight anyway”.