You know how it is, you’ve left college and got yourself a pretty good job (that you don’t like very much but it pays the bills) and even a steady girlfriend too (not sure if you like her that much either) but somehow everything starts to feel vaguely dissatisfying. This is where we find Kenji (Ryo Kase) at the beginning of Isao Yukisada’s sewing bee of a movie, Rock ’n’ Roll Mishin (ロックンロールミシン). However, this is not exactly the story of a salaryman risking all and becoming a great artist so much as a man taking a brief bohemian holiday from a humdrum everyday existence.
Kenji’s life probably would have continued down a path of corporate serfdom uninterrupted if he had not run into old schoolfriend Ryoichi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) who, he learns, is setting up an indie fashion label with some of his friends. Ryoichi has to leave pretty quickly but he pastes a note on the outside of the restaurant window with his contact details so Kenji can find him again.
At work the next day Kenji “enjoys” some “banter” with an extremely unpleasant corporate stooge colleague who seems to be under the mistaken impression that he and Kenji are friends. After making some misogynistic comments about how Kenji is too much of a pushover and should “knock some sense” (literally) into his girlfriend, his colleague sets in on some typical salaryman careerist chat which is exactly the kind of thing Kenji is becoming disillusioned with.
Having failed to meet her at the restaurant, Kenji returns home one evening to find his girlfriend waiting outside his flat. She comes in and immediately takes off her clothes and gets into bed all without saying anything at all. When her T-shirt accidentally blows off the washing line and gets caught on some cabling below, Kenji remembers about his friend’s fashion company and decides to pay them a visit. Kenji is taken in by the sense of freedom and individual enterprise he finds in the workshop in contrast to his corporate drone office job. Eventually Kenji quits and joins the fashion gang full-time though he quickly finds that making a dream come true is surprisingly uphill work.
Unlike other films of this nature, there’s very little inspirational content to be found in Rock ’n’ Roll Mishin. The “mishin” of the title means a sewing machine and early on Ryoichi teases Kenji by telling him that his is a “rock and roll” machine because it beats out 8 stitches a second and if you really step on it it goes up to 16. Ryoichi’s teacher and mentor, Megumi (Ryo) lets Kenji in on the joke by explaining that it’s really called a “lock” machine because it holds the fabric in place for you. The other member of the team is a fashionista, Katsuo (Kenji Mizuhashi), who wants to create fashion that makes a sun of your heart so that you shine forth with an inner light. Needless to say, though the original three all have fashion skills from Ryoichi who’s the designer to Megumi who is a fashion teacher and Katsuo who studied fashion in London, nobody has any kind of business sense or a real business plan for this fledgling business.
In another film this might be where Kenji’s salaryman experience plays in, completing a missing element of the group which will enable them to triumph over adversity. However, Kenji’s experience is also fairly limited but the sensible economic advice he has to offer largely falls on deaf ears with his more creatively orientated teammates. They may understand the business on some level – at least enough to know what they can realistically expect to charge for their wares but are completely clueless about how they can go about managing their costs and maximising their profits. They also don’t really seem to know how to promote their business in anything other than a grungy, underground way which might be cool but is unlikely to take off without a serious amount of cynical marketing gimmickry which Ryoichi isn’t prepared to go for.
What Rock ’n’ Roll Mishin has to say about the youth of today isn’t very encouraging. It paints them as a group of unrealistic dreamers unwilling to put the work in to achieve anything. They might start to go for it in the beginning, but as soon as things start to look up they get scared and childishly run away rather than following through. Ryoichi is very much the tortured artist type, so fixated on maintaining his own image of artistic integrity that he’s completely unable to commercialise to work in any effective kind of way. Kenji is sucked in by the atmosphere of creative freedom but ultimately he has very little to offer and even if he is the one most affected by this new, bohemian lifestyle he’s also the best placed to recognise that you can’t live on dreams alone.
It’s tempting to read Rock ’n’ Roll Mishin as an ultra conservative, stick to the path message movie. It almost wants to say that it’s just not worth trying anything new because you’ll never see it through and you’ll be heading back to your old life with your tail between your legs quicker than you can say haute couture. However, even if the typical underdog triumphs against the odds narrative doesn’t materialise, Kenji at least comes to view his time in the fashion business in a broadly positive light. What he values is the time spent with friends, and, even if it didn’t work out quite the way they would have liked they still created something that was a success on its own terms and was ultimately appreciated by fellow travellers along the same path which, in the end, is what it’s all about.
Not exactly a trailer but this music video for one of the songs used in the film, Rock ‘n’ Roll Missing by Scudelia Electro, contains some footage from the film (lyrics in English)
When a crime has been committed, it’s important to remember that there may be secondary victims whose lives will be destroyed even if they themselves had no direct involvement in the case itself. This is even more true in the tragic case that person who is responsible is themselves a child with parents and siblings still intent on looking forward to a life that their son or daughter will now never lead. This isn’t to place them on the same level as bereaved relatives, but simply to point out the killer’s family have also lost a child who they have every right to grieve for, though their grief will also be tinged with guilt and shame.
Outside of Japan where he is still primarily thought of as a TV comedian and celebrity figure, Takeshi Kitano is most closely associated with his often melancholy yet insistently violent existential gangster tales. His filmography, however, is one of the most diverse of all the Japanese “auteurs” and encompasses not only the aforementioned theatre of violence but also pure comedy and even coming of age drama. Dolls is not quite the anomaly that it might at first seem but perhaps few would have expected Kitano to direct such a beautifully colourful film inspired by one of Japan’s most traditional, if most obscure, art forms – bunraku puppet theatre.
Just look at at that title for a second, would you? Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World, you’d be hard pressed to find a more poetically titled film even given Japan’s fairly abstract titling system. All the pain and rage and sorrow of youth seem to be penned up inside it waiting to burst forth. As you might expect, the film is part of the “Jun ai” or pure love genre and focusses on the doomed love story between an ordinary teenage boy and a dying girl. Their tragic romance may actually only occupy a few weeks, from early summer to late autumn, but its intensity casts a shadow across the rest of the boy’s life.
Jellyfish Eyes (めめめのくらげ, Mememe no Kurage) is the feature film debut of the internationally popular Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami. Well known for his cutesy character designs which are as likely to turn up in the world’s best regarded art galleries as they are on a kid’s backpack, Murakami is one of Japan’s most highly regarded art exports. Having unsuccessfully tried to raise interest in the more obvious totally CG animation, Murakami has enlisted the help of gore master Yoshihiro Nishimura for some director’s chair tips in creating a live action/CGI hybrid. Jellyfish Eyes is very definitely a kids’ movie, calling it a “family film” seems unfair when the age cut off is most likely around seven or eight years old but those who meet the (lack of) height requirement are sure to lap it up.
Windows on Worlds 