Tag: Jason Gray

Linda Linda Linda (リンダ リンダ リンダ, Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)

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“We’ve only got a little more time to be the real us,” according to a young woman making a promo video for the upcoming school festival, but who really is the “real us”? Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, Nobuhiro Yamashita’s wistful high school dramedy Linda, Linda, Linda (リンダ リンダ リンダ) is in many ways about the process of coming into being along with the anxieties of what comes next. “We won’t end here,” the girl later adds, “We won’t let our high school days become a memory,” yet they already are in a kind of contemporaneous nostalgia and elegy for idealised youth.

Or at least, there’s already a kind of reaching back taking place as the tracks the girls pick for a replacement act are by The Blue Hearts, a 1980s punk band that has become a kind of cultural touchstone echoing a sense of youthful alienation and rebellion. “Linda Linda” is the kind of song everyone knows, and even if for some reason they don’t or don’t even speak Japanese, can at least join in with the riotous chorus. It’s this sense of universality that eventually gives it its power as torrential rain brings the entire school inside just in time to see the girls’ belated act and find themselves captivated by its infectious energy and an identification with their own sense of insecure anxiety.

It’s also the serendipitous rain that allows lonely songstress Takako an opportunity to perform having previously declined to do because it’s no fun playing on your own and all her former bandmates graduated the previous year. Moe, the girl who broke her fingers playing basketball in PE leaving the original band members unable to take the to the stage, also gets an opportunity to sing having otherwise been denied a moment of closure in being prevented from taking part in her final school festival. While Moe feels intensely guilty about rendering all their time spent rehearsing somewhat pointless, it’s really the drama between founding members Kei and Rinko that leads to the band’s demise in Rinko’s conviction that it’s “meaningless” to continue while the others decide to go ahead anyway asking Korean exchange student Son (Bae Doona) to be their vocalist because she just happened to come down the stairs at the right moment and said yes because she didn’t really understand what they were saying.

Prior to her involvement with the band, Son had been a rather isolated figure trapped in the “Japan-Korea Culture Exchange Exhibit” which seems to have been more her teacher’s idea than her own and in any case gets no actual visitors. Her Japanese is a bit limited and most of her interactions are with a little girl who lends her manga to help her learn quickly, but becoming part of the band allows her to find her voice both literally and figuratively in taking the lead as the vocalist. A boy who claims to have fallen in love with her (Kenichi Matsuyama) goes to the trouble of learning a long speech in Korean to convey his feelings, yet a bemused Son replies to him in Japanese that she’s pretty indifferent to his existence before switching to Korean to explain that she’s leaving because she’d rather be hanging out with her friends with an expression that implies she’s only just realised that’s what they are. By contrast, she has a bilingual conversation with guitarist Kei (Yu Kashii) in which they seem to understand each other perfectly and each express how glad they are that they got to be in the band together. 

Similarly, it’s the concert itself that seems to heal rifts with a simple “Are you alright?” from Rinko (Takayo Mimura) to Kei whose friendship might, as someone says, essentially be too close for them to really get along. Drummer Kyoko (Aki Maeda) decides to declare her feelings for a longstanding crush before the concert. In the end she doesn’t manage it, but it doesn’t quite matter somehow because their performance is itself a kind of coming into being in which “the real us” comes into focus if also in a moment that itself becomes romanticised or idealised as an encapsulation of youth. Yamashita travels through the school festival as if it were a passage from one state of being to another, from the noodle stalls and crepe stands to haunted houses and the boy creating his own moment through encapsulating them on film, before ending with an unending song “so we can laugh tomorrow,” and the “real us” lives on.

Linda Linda Linda opens in US cinemas 5th September courtesy of GKIDS.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)

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Orphaned salarymen are the soulless ghosts haunting an increasingly empty city in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s eerie tale of urban anxiety Tokyo Sonata (トウキョウソナタ). Undermining the certainty of the traditional family, Kurosawa paints it as a simulacrum dependent on each member playing their respective role blindly or otherwise, though in this case the integrity of the family unit is shaken by an economic intervention in which the accepted rules of the society have been upended with a vindictiveness that seems inexplicably unfair. 

This is the bargain of the salaryman dream. A man like Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) now aged 46 came of age at the tail end of an era of economic prosperity. He was brought up in an atmosphere of jobs for life in which the corporate family was almost more “real” than the emotional which is one reason why it comes as such a shock when his boss effectively divorces him. He’s found someone new, planning to outsource Sasaki’s entire department to China while less than kindly explaining that as he has no other skills he of no more use to the company. Sasaki immediately clears his desk in anger, walking home early with a pair of carrier bags then, after meeting his son in the street, attempting to climb in through an upstairs window to avoid alerting his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), to the fact he’s home early.

Sasaki is unable to tell her that he’s lost his job in part because of the acute embarrassment it would cause him. Somewhat dazed and confused, he’s become one of many disenfranchised salarymen who survived the 15 years of economic stagnation only to have the rug pulled out from under them. Being a salaryman was in a way his whole identity and without it he doesn’t know who he is, which is one reason he puts on a suit every day and goes to sit in the park surrounded by other similarly dressed men with briefcases who now seem to haunt the city like crows ominously dotting the horizon. In a repeated motif, Kurosawa shows us people trapped in kafkaesque queuing situations shuffling around buildings while prevented from moving forward but forced to keep pace with the increasingly glacial environment. At the moment an old school friend he runs into, Kurosu (Kanji Tsuda), seems to give up he is swept into a great parade of the suited and hopeless while Sasaki hovers on its edges. 

It’s this threat to Sasaki’s masculine pride which is largely founded on his economic ability to support a family that kickstarts a chain reaction in his home even he becoming increasingly violent and authoritarian in an effort to overcome the sense of humiliation and powerlessness he feels after being made “redundant”. His younger son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), tells him he wants to learn the piano but Sasaki irritably shuts him down either because he’s now worried about the money or simply sees it as a frivolous waste of time. Later when Megumi asks him why he won’t he change his mind he insists that he has to stick to his original decision otherwise it would undermine his patriarchal authority as a father. 

But this “authority” was perhaps already largely illusionary given that an intense work schedule meant he was rarely home to do much parenting. After finding out Kenji spent his lunch money on piano lessons behind his back he ironically shouts at him for lying and keeping secrets even though this is obviously what he himself has been doing in keeping up the illusion of his identity as a conventional salaryman. His older son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), was keeping secrets too his being his desire to join the US military believing that Japan no longer has a future for him in an atmosphere of stagnation not only economic but emotional and spiritual. Takashi tells his mother she should leave Sasaki, but to her question of who would play the role of mother replies that it makes no difference simultaneously encouraging her to reclaim an individual identity and perhaps robbing her of one just as Sasaki lost his in being shorn of his salaryman credentials. 

Lying on the sofa one evening she raises her arms and poignantly asks someone to lift her up but Sasaki has already gone to bed without even looking at her. Her life as a housewife is thankless and emotionally unfulfilling. Donuts she spent ages making go uneaten while her husband and sons brood on their own problems alone. At a car dealership, the salesman shows her a people carrier explaining that it’s perfect for family camping trips while she gravitates towards a red convertible, mesmerised by the way the roof can just disappear as if it were literally freeing her of her stultifying existence. On showing Takashi the shiny new driving license she’s just got as a symbol of her desire for independence, he scoffs that she’ll never use it but she counters him that it’s for “ID” which it is in more ways than one.

The family is imploded, the illusions of a conventional middle-class life upturned as Sasaki and Megumi each ask themselves if there’s a way to start again and escape their sense of middle-aged futility and disappointment. Cracking under the weight of conventionality, the foundations begin to fracture but the family nevertheless finds itself returning if with greater degrees of clarity and perhaps with less inclination to play the play the roles assigned to them rather than those they might wish to play as embodied by Kenji’s moving performance at the piano capturing all of the chaos and confusion of the world around him but finding in it also harmony and a gentle breeze that feels almost as if the city itself were breathing once again.

Tokyo Sonata screens Feb. 18 as part of Family Portrait: Japanese Family in Flux

International trailer (English subtitles)

Plan 75 (Chie Hayakawa, 2022)

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In 2016, a 26-year-old man went on a violent rampage murdering 19 people at a care home for the disabled claiming that he had done it “for the sake of society”. Prior to his crime, the killer had written an open letter in which he stated that he dreamed of a world in which those with severe disabilities could be peacefully euthanised, while claiming that those with no ability to communicate had no right to life and were nothing more than a drain on society. An expansion of her earlier short featured in the anthology film Ten Years Japan, Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 opens with a sequence which appears to directly reference the 2016 mass killing but in place of the widespread outrage and reconsideration of a social stigma towards disability that followed in its wake, the government decides to implement a “voluntary” euthanasia program for those aged 75 and over in response to the “concerns” of the young in an ageing society. 

Intergenerational resentment does indeed seem to be a motivating factory, the killer in this incident feeling himself oppressed by the responsibility of caring for the elderly while simultaneously hemmed in by a stangnant economy and heirarchical society. He points out that Japanese people have always praised self-sacrifice on behalf of the nation and alludes to the archaic tradition of ubasute or throwing out the old in which elderly people were abandoned on mountainsides to die in time of famine. There is no denying that the Plan 75 initiative has its insidious qualities in placing undue pressure on elderly people to give up their lives in order not to “burden” the young, an elderly woman attending a cancer screening remarking that she feels a little awkward as if she’s “clinging on to life”, being somehow greedy in the simple desire to continue living. 

Meanwhile, their society has already abandoned them. 78-year-old Michiko (Chieko Baisho) had no children and lives alone supporting herself with a job as a hotel maid where all of her colleagues are also elderly women. When one of them has a fall at work, they are all laid off. The hotel claims that they’ve received complaints from guests about exploiting elderly people, but Michiko suspects it’s more like they don’t want one of them to drop dead in someone’s room. Not wanting to be a “burden”, Michiko is reluctant to apply for social security but even when she accepts she has few other options the desk at city hall is closed. Her building, like her now old, is set for demolition but no one is willing to rent to an unemployed 78-year-old woman nor is anyone willing to employ one. More and more Michiko is pushed towards Plan 75 if only to escape her loneliness. Being robbed of the opportunity to work also removes the opportunity for socialising especially as the other old ladies decide to move in with family and leave the area. 

This is in fact an integral part of the Plan 75 business plan with case workers specifically instructed to keep the applicants happy through regular phone calls while prohibited from meeting them in person to prevent the older person changing their minds having made new social connections that make their lives more bearable. In the quietly harrowing scenes at the processing centre, for want of a better term, it becomes obvious that the majority of those submitting to Plan 75 are women as staff members empty out their handbags, dumping their possessions into a large bin while setting aside anything of value such as watches or bracelets which are perhaps another valuable revenue stream for a callous government that sees the programme as a cost cutting exercise.  

Case worker Hiromu (Hayato Isomura) only becomes conflicted about Plan 75 after recognising an applicant as his estranged uncle and eventually discovering that despite sales claims of dignified funerals remains are often sent to landfill care of an industrial waste company. His uncle’s plight perhaps highlights the pitfalls of life in post-war Japan. Living hand to mouth working construction jobs all across the country he never had an opportunity to put down roots or save for his old age and is now living a lonely life of desperate poverty. Heartbreakingly he put his application in on his 75th birthday, an act Hiromu’s boss describes as almost heroic as if he couldn’t wait to sacrifice himself for the common good. Later a sign goes up that fixed addresses are no longer needed to apply, while the Plan 75 stand in a local park where they are in the process of putting bars on the benches so that homeless people can’t sleep there doubles as a soup kitchen. 

One has to ask, if there was money available for all of these resources to help people die why is it not available to help them live? A young woman assigned as Michiko’s handler appears to have second thoughts while bonding with her over the phone, tearfully reminding her she still has the right to withdraw (though it’s never mentioned if that means repaying the $1000 signing bonus) while Michiko’s life too has been brightened by this little bit of intergenerational friendship, itself cruelly commodified in the allotted 15-minute sessions included in the plan. Told with quiet restraint, Hayakawa’s vision of an eerily dystopian future in which human life is defined by productivity and all human relationships transactional, where loneliness is the natural condition and society itself has become little more than a death cult, is painfully resonant in our increasingly disconnected world. 

Plan 75 screens at Japan Society New York on Nov. 20 as part of The Female Gaze: Women Filmmakers from JAPAN CUTS and Beyond.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 KimStim