Tag: Keisuke Watanabe

Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード, Yuichi Fukuda, 2022)

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According to the opening voiceover of Yuichi Fukuda’s seasonal comedy Black Night Parade (ブラックナイトパレード), we’ve all got Christmas wrong. It’s not completely true that Santa only gives presents to the nice kids for there are in fact two Santas, the other one, the anti-Santa, making sure that bad children have a very unhappy Christmas receiving gifts ranging from the traditional lump of coal to offal. The Santa dressed in black is described as being a little more egalitarian, but does indeed pedal in disappointment and the opposite of the holiday spirit though in another way perhaps he’s just an embodiment of a sense of resentment towards to the unfairness of the contemporary society. 

Miharu (Ryo Yoshizawa) is very definitely grown up and a good example of someone who regards themselves as earnest but is becoming fed up with seeing those he regards as acting inconsiderately prosper. Still working part-time at a convenience store having repeatedly failed to get into university or find a full-time job, he’s irritated by his loudmouth slacker colleague Kaiser (Taishi Nakagawa) who just seems to constantly fall up in life while Miharu ends up being the responsible one doing most of his work for him. When Kaiser asks him to cover his shift Christmas Eve so he can go on a date with his pretty girlfriend seconds after telling him he’s actually had a full-time job offer, it obviously stings more than a little. But when Miharu takes a leaf out of his book and tries to take home one of the expired Christmas cakes, he’s immediately caught and threatened by his boss not to mention being deemed a bad boy by the Santa in black. 

Though in his case, it results in an ironic job officer to become one of Santa’s helpers at a gloomy Santa centre where they run a virtual surveillance state to figure out whether the kids that send in letters to Santa have really been as good as they claim to have been. Surveillance queen Shino (Kanna Hashimoto) decides one little lad hasn’t on catching him cheating on a test despite having emphasised how hard he’d been studying in his letter. Cheating on a test is obviously not “good”, but perhaps it’s not innards in your stocking bad either and Miharu’s moral compass is going haywire trying to understand the strange world he finds himself in while participating in a contest to join the elite Reindeer division of Christmas shock troops. Meanwhile, he’s also confronted by a conspiracy in which the red Santa has already been murdered by rats controlled by a mysterious group who hate Christmas and are trying to eradicate it. If they don’t find a new red Santa soon, the magic will be broken forever.

Despite the zaniness of the concept, the humour is a little less grating than the broad variety style generally employed by Fukuda in his other films even if several of the performances are on the larger side. Rather than rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas or coming to an accommodation with the unfairness of the contemporary society, Miharu is guided towards dealing with his own unresolved childhood trauma which repurposes the empty consumerism of a contrived holiday tradition as a means of signalling of a lack of something or the roots of unhappiness. Even if most most kids are asking for the latest toys it may be because they want others to play with with them, while some just want company because their parents have to work long hours and they’re lonely at home. 

Despite making the astute observation that the best way to disappoint a naughty child is to get them what they asked for but not quite right, Miharu eventually discovers a calling in making sure no child is left empty-handed on Christmas Day spreading the spirit of the season wherever he goes even while being chased by packs of evil rats out to destroy the joy of Christmas forever. Then again, there is some mildly satirical humour in the likening of Santa Claus House to a “black company” ruthlessly exploiting its employees while engaging in some very dubious corporate shenanigans in its use of customer data and clear invasion of privacy in its all-seeing surveillance network. In any case, it does appear that Christmas is safe from the rat race for the moment and children good or bad will wake up to a surprise equally so on Christmas morning for years to come.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

As Long As We Both Shall Live (わたしの幸せな結婚, Ayuko Tsukahara, 2023) [Fantasia 2023]

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A young woman with chronically low self-esteem learns to love herself after bonding with a taciturn nobleman in Ayuko Tsukahara’s adaptation of the fantasy romance light novel series by Akumi Agitogi, As Long As We Both Shall Live (わたしの幸せな結婚, Watashi no Shiawasena Kekkon). Set in an alternate version of the late 19th/early 20th century in which the nation is ruled by an emperor who has the ability to foresee the future and leads a series of prominent clans of superpowered soldiers against “aberrations” who wreak havoc in the lives ordinary people, the film is effectively a kind of Cinderella story only the fairy godmothers are a kindly housekeeper a shady underground sect with the power to manipulate people’s minds. 

In any case, Miyo (Mio Imada) was born into a noble house the members of which have the ability to manipulate the wind though sadly she appears to have been born “powerless” and is bullied by her step-mother and step-sister who treat her as a servant. At 19, she learns she’s to be married off and is excited about finally escaping her abusive family home but also wary that it might not make much difference because her potential husband, Kiyoka Kudo (Ren Meguro), is said to be cruel and violent. All three of his matches have fled the house in under three days though being so used to mistreatment Miyo is sure that it will just be a matter of adjusting to her new circumstances. 

What she discovers is that Kiyoka doesn’t seem all that bad just a bit aloof and direct in his manner of speech. Nevertheless, she continues to believe that she isn’t good enough to marry him because she doesn’t have any magical powers and is convinced he will call off the engagement when he finds out. Meanwhile, she bonds with housekeeper Yurie (Mirai Yamamoto) after breaking protocol by helping out around the house for something to do though it is perhaps a bit odd that someone from such an apparently wealthy family has only one servant and seems to lead an incredibly simple life devoted to his role as a soldier helping to keep the aberrations in check especially now that the emperor is dying and someone has apparently released the pent up souls of fellow aberration fighters who died horribly and are filled with dangerous resentment.

Many of Miyo’s self-esteem issues are down to the way she was treated by her family and having lost her mother at two years old though there is obviously parallel in her literal “powerlessness” and the lack of agency that is afforded to her in having been kept a prisoner in the family estate only to be traded off in marriage by a father apparently out for whatever he can get for such a “mistake” of a daughter. It’s perhaps a slight failing in the narrative that she turns out to have powers after all rather than simply beginning to accept herself in the comparatively warmer environment of Kiyoka’s home even if it might also be a little awkward that her self-love is born of feeling loved by Kiyoka and to a lesser extent Yurie and immediately has her pledging to give her life for him if only he should ask it. 

For his part, Kiyoka is also undergoing something of a transformation in that it turns out he also felt estranged from his mother and is actually kind at heart just incredibly awkward and taciturn. The reason he didn’t bond with any of his previous suitors seems to be that he objected to their insincerity and the nonsense that goes along with being a member of the aristocracy like the concept of arranged marriage in itself, later taking Miyo’s family to task for their treatment of her claiming that he doesn’t really care about her social status or whether or not she has any powers. In any case, it’s love that helps her overcome her “powerlessness” even if she uses her newfound inner strength for someone else rather than herself, taking control over and her life regaining self-confidence as someone worthy of love, respect, and basic human decency not to mention happiness. A post-credits trail hints at a potential sequel or even series expanding on the franchise’s rich world building but for now at least it seems as if Miyo has found her happy ending, finally able to embrace life on her own terms rather than feeling as if she needs to make a mends for her existence.

As Long As We Both Shall Live screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Thorns Of Beauty (恋のいばら, Hideo Jojo, 2023)

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“Can two women who like the same guy become best friends?” A loose remake of Pang Ho-Cheung’s 2004 Hong Kong comedy Beyond our Ken, Hideo Jojo’s Thorns of Beauty (恋のいばら, Koi no Ibara) finds a jilted ex teaming up with the current squeeze against a no good guy who has compromising photos of each of them he could potentially expose online anytime he feels like it. Not quite everything is as it first appears, yet as they plot revenge against the caddish Kentaro (Keisuke Watanabe) the pair begin to discover a bond that runs deeper than their shared quest for validation.

Momo (Honoka Matsumoto), a mousy librarian, first accosts Riko (Tina Tamashiro), an aspiring dancer who works at a nightclub, on a bus, staring at her intensely until she finally removes her earphones. In truth, Momo never quite shakes an edge of possibly dangerous eccentricity and there is always an underlying doubt that she is telling the truth when she explains to Riko that she and Kentaro were previously an item and he has private photographs of her she fears he may intend to post online. For whatever reason, Riko decides to hear her out and though insisting that Kentaro’s not that sort of guy seems to think there may be something in it. A photographer by trade, Kentaro has in the past photographed her without her consent claiming that he spends all day photographing things other people find beautiful and wanted capture something for himself in his free time. 

Much of the story is filtered through a version of Sleeping Beauty that Momo finds at the library where she works. As the two women bond in their shared quest for revenge, Jojo often plays with the image of them as “witches” lighting them in an eerie green while they dress in black with hats that cast shadows over their faces. Yet we also find ourselves wondering who the sleeping beauty is in this scenario, an unexpected candidate turning out to be Kentaro’s elderly grandmother who has dementia and spends her days collecting shiny things to build a vast fairytale castle. Momo comes to see herself as hoping to wake Riko from a moment of romantic fantasy with a man who in the end doesn’t really care for her which she likely knows but has allowed the relationship to continue mainly out of a sense of inertia. 

But in teaming up with Riko, Momo also begins to awaken from her own low self-esteem in believing herself to be inferior to someone like her. There are times when we wonder if this is going to turn into a Single White Female-style bid at identity theft as Momo seems to idolise her new friend possibly planning to eliminate her and reclaim her place in Kentaro’s life. In the end, however, both women are throughly awakened from their romantic illusions in realising that Kentaro is indeed that sort of person with a hard disk full of pictures of other women just like them while their friendship also begins to take on a distinctly homoerotic quality that clearly runs beyond simple friendship or female solidarity. 

As Momo reflects, Sleeping Beauty is a passive heroine who is asleep for the entirety of her own story. When she’s born, the fairies give her various gifts that turn her into a stereotypical figure of idealised femininity and leave her with nothing to want or strive for. Momo wonders if that doesn’t make her a little boring and if Sleeping Beauty actually wanted any of those things or in the end they were just burden to her. Momo would only be grateful for things she actually wanted like the ability to totally become herself, while Riko reflects on a “past life” as a woman living happily with her two sons by a lake in Switzerland. Cutting through the thorns of their illusions, they awaken each other to a sense of possibility each of them may long have forgotten. Strangely poignant in the touching quality of its central romance along with fairytale allusions, the film in the end allows both women to reclaim an image of themselves from a man who tried to take it from them without ever really bothering to look at it. 

Thorns Of Beauty screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

International trailer (English subtitles)