Tag: Kou Machida

August in the Water (水の中の八月, Sogo Ishii, 1995)

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How does the world, or perhaps the cosmos, attempt to communicate with us? As Douglas Adams once did, August in the Water (水の中の八月, Mizu no naka no Hachigatsu) suggests it maybe through the dolphins who here at least seem to be quasi-mystical beings existing in what is really the lifeblood of humanity. In the film’s opening scenes, we’re told that the hero, Mao (Shinsuke Aoki) whose name means “true fish” and his friend Ukiya (Masaaki Takarai) have taken part-time jobs at a marine part to learn how to communicate with dolphins, but it’s the heroine Izumi, whose name means “spring” who eventually claims to have learned to do so. 

At least, her final words are that the dolphins have taught her “the perfect balance” which has allowed her to open the floodgates both literal and metaphorical to return water to an arid land. We’re repeatedly told that there’s been a lengthy drought and a water shortage leading to rationing and locked pipes though the marine park remains open and the local festival goes ahead  hinting at the ways in which we do and don’t value our natural resources. Izumi’s science teacher tells the kids that humans don’t contribute to the Earth and waste the resources that it gives us which might help to explain the gradual ossification of the planet including a mysterious condition known as the Stone Disease which causes people to collapse in the street as their organs harden. 

Izumi’s sister Yo later remarks that she thinks humanity came from a distant planet long ago and yearns to go home but to do so we must become stone because water is a substance that exists only here on Earth. Turning to stone is however seen as quite a bad thing and also echoes a millennial distrust in increasing technology with TV pundits positing that if human brains were replaced with computer chips we wouldn’t need to worry about water shortages anymore. In Yo’s dream, after people’s brains have become computer chips they become connected to the universe and can transport their minds to the moon enabling them to communicate with anyone anywhere at any time. 

But then despite the potential for communication that computers were only just beginning to offer in the mid-90s, Izumi warns her sister to stay away from them as they leave you vulnerable to the Stone Disease. The boys’ ultramodern friend, Miki (Reiko Matsuo), is a computer addict and it’s she who eventually manages to unlock parts of the mystery but paradoxically as if she were some kind of seer correctly predicting that an accident will befall Izumi on 23rd August and discovering a prophecy that in the year humanity neglects the water god two meteorites will fall in close proximity and drought will follow. Only a ritual conducted by the chosen one under a full moon will be able to cure it. Two child-like old men also warn that nothing’s been the same since they moved the old shinto shrine over which there have also been sightings of UFOs.

After the diving accident in which Izumi plunges meteor-like into the pool, she herself feels as if she’s been split in two almost like the world itself which is divided between these ancient beliefs and modern advancements that have perhaps blocked the flow that once allowed us to communicate with each other and with the universe. A psychiatrist suggests that Izumi may be suffering with sudden onset schizophrenia as a result of her accident and that all of her talk about secret messages from dolphins and mysterious aliens who want to turn the world to stone is nothing but confused delusion though in the film’s closing scenes she herself takes on a supernatural quality as a kind of etherial saviour figure who realises that she may have been dead ever since the accident and is now something different, different and distant as her sister puts it, charged with the mission of rejuvenating a human spirit long since dulled by mechanisation.

In contrast to Ishii’s earlier films which brimmed with punkish energy, August in the Water unfolds at a leisurely pace with eerie yet nostalgic mood music and a new age sensibility speaking to millennial youth with a sense of turn of the century anxiety and human remorse that perhaps we’ve already poisoned our futures. Nevertheless, despite his youthful heartbreak, what Izumi bequeaths to Mao and humanity itself is seemingly the ability to live in the abundant fullness of existence until that existence is done and we return once again to water and the comforting embrace of the Earth.

August in the Water screened as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Punk Samurai (パンク侍、斬られて候, Gakuryu Ishii, 2018)

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Gakuryu Ishii began his career under the name Sogo as a representative of the youth voice, in fact still a college student when invited by Nikkatsu to film a feature-length version of his Panic High School short though they paradoxically saddled him with the more experienced Yukihiro Sawada as a co-director in case his voice turned out to be more youthful than anticipated. In any case, he went on to make his name with a series of anarchic punk films such as Burst City and The Crazy Family before retreating from filmmaking in the early 2000s. When he returned in 2012 with Isn’t Anyone Alive?, he did so under a new name, Gakuryu, as if signalling a new phase in his artistic career that seemed to have left punk behind.

Like 2015’s That’s it, Punk Samurai is billed as a kind of return to Ishii’s anarchic roots while also harking back to surreal samurai movie Gojoe. Even so, Punk Samurai isn’t really a punk samurai film even in its irreverence towards the genre so much as an ironic jidaigeki comedy which eventually positions its hero’s nihilistic outsider status as his saving grace in a “fake” world where nothing has true meaning. “This world might be fake, but I’m alive” he insists, claiming not to ask anything of it, simply stating that he is “different” because he belongs to no group and has been a lonely a wanderer.

Nevertheless, Kake (Go Ayano) had wanted to join a clan so desperately that he spun a tale of dangerous cult rebellion to a naive retainer of a useless lord whose inability to rule has ruined his fiefdom. After killing a pilgrim he believed to be a member of the Bellyshaker Party, Kake is taken in by the Kuroae where he is enlisted by duplicitous councillor Naito (Etsushi Toyokawa) who seizes on the idea of the Bellyshaker threat as a means of undermining his rival, Ohura (Jun Kunimura), to seize the reins from overly serious lord Kuroae (Masahiro Higashide). 

The Bellyshaker cult believes that this “fake” world exists within a giant tapeworm and seeks escape though being excreted by it into the “real” world as a means of achieving some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Their furious belly shaking is deliberately meaningless in an effort to antagonise he tapeworm to such a degree that it gives it spasms to “spew” the believer into a more authentic existence. Not even the cult leader believed this to be true, and as Kake later suggests the appeal lies in a kind of Manichaeanism that allows the believer to believe nothing is their fault it’s just that this “fake” world is wrong. In the end, the conflict comes down to a battle between “monkeys and idiots”, while even an enlightened ape (Masatoshi Nagase) finds his revolution failing and is left with no option other than to retreat to the Heavens. 

The world is indeed in disarray, Kuroae is constantly plagued by his own poor decision making, or failure to make decisions at all, while there are constant allusions to the decline of his clan from persistent famine to military weakness after having made most of his foot soldiers redundant as part of an austerity programme. Many of the recruits to the “fake” Bellyshaker cult resurrected by Naito with the assistance of former devotee Chayama (Tadanobu Asano), who has two telepathic servants who speak for him, are in fact refugees from Kuroae who fled its disorder. Kake prides himself on being an outsider but in reality had wanted to join the clan, and there is perhaps something in the sudden collapse of the world around him along with a return to blue skies the moment his rebellion is ended. 

Yet for all its weirdness and incomprehensibility, for much of is running time Punk Samurai is a typical jidaigeki comedy about a useless lord, his clever underlings, and a chaotic ronin if one that also hints at the absurdist meaninglessness of the hierarchical samurai society. Only in its closing moments does the film truly embrace its punk spirit with psychedelic kaleidoscope backgrounds, electric swords, and the true slash down of the social order as Kake’s life comes full circle proving that even in this “fake” and meaningless world there are some things from which there is no escape.

Punk Samurai is released on blu-ray in the UK on 13th March courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Robinson’s Garden (ロビンソンの庭, Masashi Yamamoto, 1987)

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By 1987 Japanese society was at the height of Bubble-era consumerism. Everything was bright and exciting, money flowed freely, and everyone worked all the time. Meanwhile, there was also a flourishing of avant-garde subcultures among young people who actively rejected the salaryman straitjacket and sought for more individualistic freedoms in their lives. Masashi Yamamoto had begun his career with explorations of counter-culture life such as his 1982 debut Carnival of Night but shifts into a more metaphysical gear with his trippy 1987 tale of nature’s revenge and the costs of life in a solo commune, Robinson’s Garden (ロビンソンの庭, Robinson no Niwa). 

Two years later, Junichi Suzuki would also draw inspiration from the tale of Robinson Crusoe in the Bubble-era farce Robinson on the Beach which is in many ways an inversion of Robinson’s Garden in which a low-level salaryman’s life is upended when he wins a brand new house in the suburbs but becomes the subject of class-based resentment from his bosses while expected to play act the “model family” as part of the developer’s ideal homes marketing campaign. Kumi (Kumiko Ohta) by contrast is a floating bohemian living at the beginning of the film in a multi-cultural commune and supporting herself by selling drugs of which she is also a user. Drunk and stumbling around in the darkness, she accidentally comes across an abandoned industrial complex and is bewitched by the garden growing inside its walls as nature begins to reclaim its own. Selling most of her possessions in a yard sale, she leaves the commune and begins squatting in the factory attempting to return to the land by growing her own produce and living entirely alone. 

The bohemian, internationalist Tokyo that Kumi inhabits stands in direct contrast to that often seen in contemporary mainstream cinema, her eventual decision to leave this globalised communal society for ultra isolationism an intense irony. Then again, there is something of a negative judgement towards the aimless way she lives her life which extends to the wider world around her. Meeting up in a cafe with a friend recently released from prison, an extremely drunk man continues to have significant difficulty understanding where he is and what’s going on eventually picking up a table but unsure what to do with it. She and her friends are often described, and sometimes describe themselves, as “wacko” in their attempts to live outside of accepted social norms and it’s when Kumi invites her friends into her new private utopia that it first begins to betray her as a prayer circle and a pointless argument somehow provoke a mass brawl while Kumi remains on her sun lounger feeling the first pangs of an illness which will continue to plague her throughout the rest of the film. 

This may in part be down to a strange painting placed on her wall by an intruder, but nature also begins to take against her best efforts as the seasons change and her large crop of cabbages, for some reason all she appears to plant, is destroyed by heavy rainfall which later leads to flooding. Best friend Maki (Cheebo) ventures into a basement and finds tree roots growing through it, listening intently to rumbling behind a wall she attributes to the presence of the subway but is later implied to echo the scrabbling of a ghostly otter looking for its family. A casual boyfriend who stays the night appears to have an episode of mental instability while exploring as if the environment has driven him mad while Kumi becomes progressively sicker with debilitating stomach pains and fever. 

Yet the only lesson that we see her learn is that we are not the masters of our environment. With her help, nature gradually reclaims this previously industrial space filling halls with flowers and covering the walls with greenery. Even her pink moped lies rusty and half-buried while she furiously digs a hole with seemingly no way of climbing out unassisted. Meanwhile, a mean little girl that for some reason always hung around the factory, even at one point eating KFC in the rain, flies a model aeroplane around a sacred tree and trashes a toy birdcage as if playing in the ruins of a post-industrial world. Called to something older and earthier, Kumi retreats fully from the highly corporatised, consumerist society of the Bubble era but the jury seems to be out on whether her experiment in isolationism is success or failure. Yamamoto’s famous distain for logical narrative progression lends an absurdist air to Kumi’s continuing desire to return to the garden but captures the mystifying allure of nature in all its ethereal, if perhaps sinister, glory. 

Robinson’s Garden streams in the US until Sept. 2 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.

Restoration trailer (no subtitles)