Tag: Masaki Miura

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)

Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド, Masashi Iijima, 2024)

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An avalanche approaches a small town in Japan, a harbinger of change in which the centuries old practice of bear hunting has finally been put to rest by government directive. The buried question at the centre of Masashi Iijima’s Promised Land (プロミスト・ランド) is who exactly that land has been promised to and what the rights and responsibilities surrounding it are in the midst of a changing society in which there may longer be a place for the hunter.

Some might argue that there shouldn’t be, and it has to be said this is one ancient tradition that’s increasingly hard to defend. Set in 1983, the film finds the “Matagi”, or traditional hunter, already all but extinct even before the head of the local association (which appears to only have five members) calls them all together and tells them the hunt is off for that year due to a preservation order by local government. One of the younger members, Rei (Kanichiro), immediately objects sensing that if the hunt is canceled this year it will never be held again. He says he thinks it’s unfair as it’s industry encroaching on the forests that has led to a decrease in the bear population rather than overhunting while another of the men takes constant pops at rich men from the city who come in and treat hunting like a hobby failing to abide by any of their rules such as not shooting mothers with their cubs.

The hunters seem to think of themselves as keeping nature in check, “culling” the bears to keep the mountain safe though there’s no sign that they are any real danger to humans and anyway their numbers are now depleted. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to defend this practice outside of tradition, but it’s evidently something very important to Rei, important enough to constitute a large part of his identity. Thus he alone is determined to defy the order and kill a bear anyway even though he knows there’s a good chance of going to prison for illegal hunting and being branded a poacher. 

Rei ropes in Nobu (Rairu Sugita), a childhood friend who apparently owes a debt to him having received a blood transfusion from him when he was four and now deeply resents having that fact wielded against him all these years later. Unlike Rei, Nobu is a much more modern young man whose father makes fun of him for wearing fashionable clothes and perfume. He hates working on his father’s farm and longs to escape the moribund small town and its brutal traditions such as the bear hunt he’s been roped into since birth just because like many things his ancestors always did it. While hunting for a bear, the pair have an opportunity to talk, Rei admitting that hunting and the gun represent for him the essence of the man he once was while reeling from the breakdown of his marriage to a woman he failed to support when she failed to fit in to village life. He recounts the story of a banker he did some work for who says that he envies the freedom of his life as a landscape gardener while he sits in a prison all day counting other people’s money but when he asks him why he does’t give it a try the man just backtracks and starts making excuses.

Rei seems to be wondering what true freedom means and perhaps feels he doesn’t really have it, asserting dominance over the mountain by killing the bear to regain control over his life. He calls the bears a gift from the mountain god as if they existed only for him to kill, though it’s difficult to see why his tradition or need for raw masculinity is worth more than a living creature’s life. When he eventually kills a bear, the film hovers on the ritualistic quality of the act as Nobu and Rei bend over the body, wafting it with leaves, and skinning its pelt before drinking its blood. This is an act of cruelty more of necessity. They have no need of the pelt or meat, do not make a major part of their income from selling them, and the bear did not threaten them. This is in short a tradition that can safely be left by the wayside, but by the film’s conclusion the two men seem to have switched positions Rei now pondering leaving the village while Nobu seemingly has a renewed desire to stay and preserve these old traditions. Perhaps it is his promised land after all, or else was intended to exist for the bears as creatures of nature free from the destructive forces of humanity.

Promised Land screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Blue Period (ブルーピリオド, Kentaro Hagiwara, 2024)

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An ennui-ridden teen finds the world opening up to him after he discovers the power of art yet fears he can’t live up to his new epiphany in Kentaro Hagiwara’s adaptation of the manga by Tsubasa Yamaguchi, Blue Period (ブルーピリオド). Less about art itself, the film presents its hero with the cowardice of conformity, challenging him above all to know himself and wield his selfhood like a weapon in a world that can at times be unforgiving.

Even so, Yatora (Gordon Maeda) is a model student who gets good grades and is known for being well-mannered but secretly he’s filled with emptiness and has largely been just going through the motions. In his opening voice over, he relates that he does what he has to do, but declares himself unfulfilled and directionless. Unexpectedly captivated by a fellow student’s painting, he’s confronted by the power of art and the freedom it offers vowing to get into prestigious art school Tokyo University of the Arts.

The constraints he feels are partly economic in that his parents can’t afford a private university so he has to do his best to get into a public arts school while his mother seems dead against the idea of him going into the arts because it doesn’t put food on the table. Yatora parrots back similar lines describing art school as a pointless waste of time but is quickly taken to task by fellow student Yuka (Fumiya Takahashi) who challenges his tendency towards conformity and needles him into independent thoughts and action.

Yuka is also contrained by conservative social codes in that she dresses in a female uniform though many still call her by her male name, Ryuji. Though the pair have a rather spiky relationship, it’s Yuka’s attempts to challenge him that bounce Yatora towards discovering his true self which as it happens is done through embracing his least palatable elements. As Yuki correctly observes, his good boy persona and tendency towards hard work are just masks for his inner insecurity.

Yet as he’s also told, art isn’t just about talent but requires passion and tenacity which in its way makes it a perfect fit for Yatora’s hard-working nature as he buckles down to become a promising artist in the run up to his high school exams. As he later reflects, others may be more talented than him but they can’t make the things that he makes because the point is they come from himself. His early pieces are criticied for their superficiality, that he only sees what’s directly in front him rather than learning to see the world in other, more unique ways and engage with it on an individual level but through his artistic journey he discovers new ways of seeing along with his true self in all its complexity. 

His newfound desire to follow his heart places him at odds with prevailing social codes which favour the sensible though it also spurs others on to do the same, one of his best friends deciding to become a pastry chef rather than get a regular salaryman job hinting at a greater desire for personal fulfilment among the young. Often poetic in his imagery such the sparks that fly from Yatora’s nascent artwork or the comforting blue of the Shibuya twilight that becomes his safe space, Hagiwara sometimes paints Yatora’s quest like a shonen manga with a series of bosses to beat in Yatora’s various rivals and challenges most which teach him something about himself that spurs him on to continue chasing his artistic dreams while the exams themselves are also mental exercises of strategy and thinking outside the box to unlock a particular kind of self-expression. There is something quite refreshing, however, in the fact that Yatora’s only real rival is himself in his ongoing quest for skills and self-knowledge, earnestly applying himself to master his craft eager only for the places his artistry will take him both mentally and physically and no longer so dissatisfied with the world around him but filled with a new curiosity and the confidence in himself to continue exploring it.

Blue Period screened in New York as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Great Absence (大いなる不在, Kei Chikaura, 2023)

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“She’s not here. That’s everything,” is what the hero of Kei Chikaura’s poetic drama A Great Absence (大いなる不在, Oinaru Fuzai) is told when enquiring about the whereabouts of his missing stepmother and in the end is forced to accept it. That’s all there is, she isn’t here. The ways that Naomi (Hideko Hara) is there and at the same time not become central to the narrative in which absence is also of course a deeply felt presence.

That might also describe Takashi’s (Mirai Moriyama) relationship with his estranged father whom he’s barely seen since his parents divorced when he was 12. Yohji (Tatsuya Fuji) was evidently a difficult man, fussy and superior. Every line that comes out of his mouth is delivered as a mini lecture and generally filled with barbed criticism even if that might not really be what he meant to say. That might be why Takashi has stayed out of contact with him, though he has little choice but to respond after being contacted by the police who tell him that Yohji called them claiming he and his wife were being held hostage. Apparently suffering with advanced dementia, Yohji has now been placed in an eldercare facility though no one seems to know what’s happened to Naomi with a vague idea that she had been hospitalised sometime after falling ill and that living alone exacerbated Yohji’s cognitive decline.

Someone later asks Takashi why he came given that with the long years of estrangement no one would have blamed him for saying it was no longer any of his business, but there does seem to be latent desire for some kind of connection albeit one frustrated by awkwardness and the unhealed wounds of the past. Yohji had been a ham radio enthusiast which suggests that he was trying to reach out to people though struggled with communication and only ever found the words in writing as evidenced by the unexpectedly poetic love letters Takashi finds stapled into the diary which once belonged to Naomi but now somehow rests with him. 

Takashi spends much of the rest of the film wanting to return the diary as if he would be abdicating responsibility for it, refusing this particular inheritance along with any curiosity about the man his father is both then and now. In the care home, Yohji believes he is being held prisoner by a foreign power and offers only bizarre and disturbing explanations for what might have happened to Naomi, while attempts to communicate with the sons from her previous marriage are frustrated by longstanding resentment. Takashi’s stepbrother informs them that Yohji refused to contribute to her medical fees claiming he didn’t see why he should though it seems that he is trying to enact some kind of revenge or is seeking compensation for what he feels Yohji took from him. He also blames Yohji for the decline of his mother’s health convinced that the strain of living someone so casually cruel even before the intensification of his dementia eventually caused her to become ill.

He might in a way have a point, though it seems it was absence that also ate away at Naomi as the man who wrote her all those long and profound letters began to slip away, becoming aggressive and irritable. He may not have forgotten her, but also did not quite recognise the woman she was. It may be that it became impossible for her go on living with someone who was no longer there just as Yohji feels the ache of her absence and is mired in the regret and longing of the young man he once was who first let her slip through his fingers. 

This sense of absence may also have crept into Takashi’s own marriage with his wife (Yoko Maki) complaining that he may not have told her what had happened with his father if he had not needed to cancel another family event, nor did he want her to accompany him though eventually she insisted and perhaps succeeds in closing a gap through their shared attempts to unravel the secrets of Yohji and mysteries of the past. The sequences from the play which Takashi is performing that bookend the film, he speaks of a broken king who may not even be a king at all and echoes the sense in which Yohji has finally become absent from himself. At times profound and elegiac, the crisp 35mm photography adds to the sense of ongoing melancholy and irresolvable loss if tempered by an elusive serenity.

Great Absence screened as part of this year’s Toronto Japanese Film Festival. It will also be making its New York Premiere as part of this year’s Japan Cuts on July 18 ahead of its theatrical opening in the US on July 19.

The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Shingo Matsumura, 2022)

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A young woman with a growing desire for independence is thrown into turmoil by a totally unexpected diagnosis of cancer in Shingo Matsumura’s gentle coming-of-age tale and maternal drama, The Lump in My Heart (あつい胸さわぎ, Atsui Munasawagi). Perhaps because of her youth, the heroine finds herself struggling not with a fear of pain or death but of being unsexed while preoccupied with what it might mean for the rest of her life if she were to lose her breasts at such an early age.

It seems that Chinatsu (Mizuki Yoshida) has had a particular hangup about her chest size since the onset of puberty when her mother, Akiko (Tokiko Tokiwa), first refused to buy her a bra, making her wait a year longer than the other girls and leaving her with a sense of embarrassment that might be out of keeping with her age. One of the things that most bothered her about the doctors visits is that she was treated by a middle-aged man who was then the first person ever to touch her breasts which is something she’s unhappy about while also feeling insecure that she’s never had a proper boyfriend and might never get one if it turns out she needs a mastectomy. As it turns out, she’s carrying a torch for childhood friend Ko (Daiken Okudaira), an aspiring actor, but is too shy to say anything especially with this threat to her sense of femininity hanging over her. Of course, it doesn’t help that the doctors are asking her to make advance decisions about things an 18-year-old wouldn’t usually consider such as if and when she might want children because her feelings about her fertility might affect her treatment options. 

Then again, it’s also true that she remains trapped in adolescence resentful when her mother tells her not to worry she’ll make all the decisions but also perhaps relieved. A little sick of their co-dependency she’d been thinking of moving out though it seems difficult to believe she’d be able to afford rent with just her part-time job while studying full-time at university. But when her mother shows a little interest in an incredibly awkward man at work it sends her in the other direction, now feeling resentful and rejected while fearing the loss of their familial intimacy given it had just been the two of them for so long after her father’s death when she was four.

Motoharu (Masaki Miura) accidentally demonstrates the entrenched sexism of the world around them when he makes a misogynistic joke as an attempt at an icebreaker when introduced as the boss at the factory where Akiko works. It later comes to light that he left his last job due to an accusation of sexual assault, and though it turns out to have been a misunderstanding highlights a lack of awareness in the working environment that feeds in to Chinatsu’s ongoing preoccupation with her femininity and the elusiveness of romance. Her homework assignment over the summer holidays is to write a story about her first love, a topic which might be seen as bordering on inappropriate, perhaps discriminatory against those who do not feel romantic desire not to mention that Chinatsu is only 18 so it is only natural that she is still in the process of figuring things out and cannot be expected to have much of a perspective on what is to her still a fairly recent (in fact ongoing) event. 

Meanwhile, her mother and Motoharu are each feeling a pang of regret that they always let things pass them by like the arrival of the circus, destined to be in town for a limited time only so it’s best to catch it while you can. Unfortunately that’s easier said than done especially when not everyone’s on the same page. The lump in Chinatsu’s heart is her yearning for romantic love, though she still lacks the courage to be honest with her feelings even if it’s helped her repair her relationship with her mother. An unexpected piece of compassionate advice also helps her begin to re-imagine her femininity in accepting that the loss of her breasts might not mean that she’s destined to be alone forever nor undeserving of romantic love symbolically dissolving the lump in her heart in allowing her to move forward with her life no matter what the future might hold.

The Lump in My Heart screened as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Original trailer (English subtitles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkvGCRzlivc&pp=ygUWVGhlIEx1bXAgaW4gbXnCoEhlYXJ0IA%3D%3D

The Rest of Our Lives (ラストターン　福山健二71歳、二度目の青春, Shinji Kuma, 2023)

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A pair of elderly men struggle to find meaning in their lives in the face of well-meaning infantilism and health anxiety in Shinji Kuma’s warmhearted ageing drama, The Rest of Our Lives (ラストターン　福山健二71歳、二度目の青春,, Last Turn: Fukuyama Kenji 71-sai, Nidome no Seishun). They are not, however, the only ones as even younger people find themselves consumed by existential confusion when reaching a natural turning point and accepting that their lives will have to change. Yet through their various relationships each begins to come to a new accommodation with the present and accept that though their lives may be different than before there are still many things for them to do. 

Kenji lost his wife two years previously having cared for her as she succumbed to Alzheimer’s. These days he likes to take a walk around the neighbourhood and then get on with his usual business though even he begins to realise that he’s become forgetful and is prone to doing strange things like leaving the remote control for the TV in the freezer. His son lives far away but is worried enough about him to install an iPad on the wall so they can call each other any time and he can also check in on him to make sure Kenji hasn’t had a fall or anything like that. But to Kenji it obviously seems like an imposition, his son’s basically spying on him and taking away his privacy along with a little of his independence. Satoru has also been checking out homes and recommends an organisation for elderly people where he can get health advice, stay active, and avoid social isolation. 

Only at the centre he starts to feel insulted, irritated that the staff members talk to them as if there were small children while getting them to do weird exercise regimes that make him feel silly. One elderly gentleman, Hashimoto, eventually storms out exclaiming that they aren’t in kindergarten anymore instantly earning Kenji’s admiration. Even so, as it turns out they are very different men. While Kenji is somewhat reserved and polite, Hashimoto is a chatterbox who makes constant inappropriate comments about women he probably only (just) gets away with because of his age and otherwise loudmouth personality. The friendship between them is slow to develop for this reason, but also because Kenji seems to have forgotten what it’s like to have a friend and accidentally upsets him leading Hashimoto to think that perhaps he is just annoying Kenji and should leave him alone. 

At the swimming pool they’re encouraged to go to, the pair run into Kaori, a former competitive swimmer like them struggling to accept the physical decline of her body along the end of her sporting career. Now working as an instructor she finds teaching an uphill battle partly in her buried resentment but also through a lack of empathy for her students unable to remember what it was like to not be able to swim and impatient with those lagging behind. They are all looking for ways to reorient themselves, not so much because of their age because of the immense changes in their lives along with a sense of loneliness. Kenji lives alone, but even Hashimoto who has moved in with his son confesses that the often feels in the way and once again infantilised seeing as they’ve given him a traditional Japanese room which lacks a locking door. 

Yet the realisation Kenji comes to is that their fear of becoming a burden is misplaced. It’s alright to ask for help when you need it and even better to offer it where you can such as in his thoughtful decision to walk a neighbourhood dog that barks all the time because the elderly lady who owned him passed away and her son’s out all day at work. Shining a light on the lives of the elderly in an increasingly ageing Japan, the film is makes a gentle plea for intergenerational solidarity and a more compassionate society that is responsive to the needs of others and cares for everyone equally. Kenji and Hashimoto marvel that even in their old age they still take pleasure in learning new things while allowing themselves to accept help as a gesture of love while making sure to return the favour wherever they can. 

The Rest of Our Lives screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Motherhood (母性, Ryuichi Hiroki, 2022)

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Is love ever really unconditional or are we all just chasing a sense of parental approval even after we become parents ourselves? According to a reporter late into Ryuichi Hiroki’s adaptation of the Kanae Minato novel Motherhood (母性, Bosei), there are only two types of women, mothers and daughters, and it is in some ways a confusion of roles that frustrates the relationship between two women who are never fully able to form a maternal connection. 

Asked by a colleague if she felt her parents loved her, the reporter answers that they were the kind who made her wear a frilly blouse with a big collar for the school play and got her new shoes for Sports Day suggesting that their love was in its way performative and they cared more about how other parents would judge them than they did about her feelings seeing as she actively hated filly blouses with big collars. Alternatively, it may have been another kind of misunderstanding in they got her these things because they thought they should make her happy and took her rejection of them as resistance. 

The little girl at the film’s centre, Sayaka whose name is only spoken in the film’s closing scenes, encounters something similar when she asks her grandmother for a Hello Kitty bag having been presented with one featuring a beautifully embroidered bird. Her mother, Rumiko (Erika Toda), finds this highly offensive thinking that Sayaka has rejected her grandmother’s lovingly handmade gift in asking for something shop bought featuring a popular character, but Sayaka treasured her grandmother’s embroidery and just wanted her to sew Hello Kitty instead. 

In her voiceover, Rumiko implies that her annoyance is also born of shame in that Sayaka has forgotten everything she taught her about consideration for the feelings of others, while in her own the pain in Sayaka’s eyes is clear. She feels slighted, almost threatened by her mother’s hushed reaction advising her that it’s better to stick with birds because then people will realise that’s what she likes and go out of their way to give her bird-themed presents. The irony is that, at least in the way Rumiko tells it, her mother Hanae (Mao Daichi) believed they were such a happy family because she accepted their love “straightforwardly” when really it was anything but. Fixated on Hanae, Rumiko lives her entire life to make her mother happy even down to her choice of husband despite warnings from all sides that they are otherwise not particularly well suited. 

The reporter makes a point of commenting on another diner’s poor table manners in a restaurant with the result that he gets up and leaves, feeling uncomfortable in the wake of her rude intrusion. She explains that she was brought up to feel as if she always had to get everything right as if being loved depended on being good much as Rumiko had felt. Little Sayaka is more or less the same, constantly chasing maternal affection though receiving little in return as Rumiko struggles to transition from the role of daughter to mother and continues to fixate on Hanae caring little for anything else. When the family are forced to vacate their cute forest cabin of a home to move in with father Satoshi’s (Masaki Miura) harridan of a mother (Atsuko Takahata), Rumiko tries the same tactic believing that if she can become “good” in her mother-in-law’s eyes then she will eventually accept her little realising that she is simply a difficult woman who will never be like her own mother and only finally embraces her as a daughter as she lovingly mothers her long after she has become bedridden and appears to be suffering from dementia. 

Then again, perhaps the constant nagging, a tendency to run people down and push them away, are also frustrated ways of showing love and ironically what the mother-in-law might have wanted was someone to fight back as Sayaka tried to do much to Rumiko’s chagrin as she accused her of ruining her attempt to curry favour. Sayaka finds a diary belonging to her father, Satoshi, which recounts memories of domestic violence which he rebelled against indirectly through taking part in the student protests little caring about the cause only channeling his rage and disillusionment into something that didn’t really matter to him so would make no difference if it failed. She calls him a weak man who hides behind women, forcing Rumiko to take care of his mother while otherwise unwilling to stand up for himself or take responsibility for his family. 

Perhaps men are only fathers or sons too and this one had little idea what to do with a daughter. Naively proposing on the third date, he said he wanted to build a “beautiful home” presumably to escape the one he grew up in attracted as much the genial atmosphere of Hanae’s upper middle class mansion as to Rumiko herself. Hiroki paints the forest-bound “dream home” in nostalgic shades of pastel, lending it almost an uncanny sense of fairytale bliss that the family can never live up to despite Rumiko’s Stepford-esque attempts to become the perfect housewife by essentially becoming her mother. Offering her version of events mainly through a confession to a priest, it’s clear that Rumiko has not been entirely honest before God, but neither of our narrators are really all that reliable even if relating how they felt something happened at the time leaving us less with one concrete version of the truth than a tragic tale of love frustrated by the codified roles of mother and daughter along with maternal jealously and anxiety. 

Nevertheless, they are united by a maternal legacy and the act of ensuring the line will continue connecting all of them to the future through the chain of motherhood. The reporter’s thinking may have a degree of internalised misogyny as she remarks on the societal prejudice that regards an unmotherly woman as hardly a woman at all while giving no recognition to women who are neither mother nor daughter in her contemplation of the maternal instinct which she otherwise regards as learned rather than innate. Asking for definitions, she comes up with the need to protect one’s child which is perhaps something her mother may have lacked when it counted but did not necessarily mean she had no love for her at all despite her fits of resentment. Shot with a degree of eeriness that dissipates in favour of a darkening realism in the later stages, Hiroki’s heightened drama nevertheless suggests that an equilibrium can be found in the maternal relationship even if it is painfully won.

Motherhood screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ©2022 “MOTHERHOOD” FILM PARTNERS

Yamabuki (やまぶき, Juichiro Yamasaki, 2022)

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The lives of a series of dejected souls in a moribund quarry town intersect in unexpected ways in a poetical drama from Juichiro Yamasaki, Yamabuki (やまぶき). The film takes it name from a colourful mountain flower which as someone later comments grows in the shade where no one can see, much like the sullen teenage girl whose mother named her after it because as she says “sunflowers face the sun but you don’t have to”. A tale of finding a place to root oneself in a rocky landscape the film has an understandably melancholy atmosphere but nevertheless eventually finds hope in perseverance or as one of the heroes finally sighs, “ask and ye shall receive”.

“This is my family” former Korean equestrian Chang-su (Kang Yoon-soo) beams on visiting a local ranch where his girlfriend’s daughter Uzuki is learning to ride. Chang-su explains that he was forced to give up horse riding after his father’s business went bust, implying at least that he’s from a formerly wealthy family in Korea with whom he seems to have few emotional ties. We see him send money abroad which seems to be intended to pay off loan sharks, presumably his father’s debts unwisely incurred by his failing business and perhaps the reason why Chang-su has come to Japan to work a manual job in a quarry. Most of the other workers are also economic migrants, many of them from the same area and conversing with each other in their own shared language though Chang-su seems to be the only Korean. After receiving the news that he’s to be made a regular employee rather than a casual worker, he starts to think that his life is back on track allowing him to once again ride a horse. 

But his hopes are suddenly dashed when his car is hit by falling rocks dislodged by police detective Hayakawa (Yota Kawase) trying to uproot a yamabuki flower to take home with him while his teenage daughter, Yamabuki (Kirara Iori), rolls her eyes and storms off. Reeling from the death of her war reporter mother in a Middle Eastern combat zone, Yamabuki is at odds with her father and searching for her own identity. She has begun hanging out with a group of protestors who stand silently at the roadside with prominent signage though their protests seem to take on many forms with no particular focus. One moment it’s the consumption tax and the next American presence in Okinawa or racism in contemporary Japan. This last one is met with a counter protest by a man shouting at them to go back where they came from, echoing the kind of othering and displacement felt by Chang-su who is let go from the quarry after the accident.

Just as Chang-su tries to anchor himself with his new family, Hayakawa tries to remake his in the absence of his wife while carrying on a kind of relationship with a Chinese sex worker equally displaced by the modern society and looking for a place to belong. As she points out, her mother came to Japan because at that time it looked like the future, but like the quarry town it now seems like the past. Her mother returned to the economic powerhouse of Shenzhen and has apparently become wealthy, though her half-Japanese daughter struggles to find a place for herself. As Chang-su reveals, “yamabuki” was also the name given to gold coins offered as bribes in the feudal era, lamenting the money-oriented nature of the contemporary society just as Yamabuki herself concludes that she wants her life to mean something and to feel present in every second of her existence. Her father had objected to the protests, but eventually tells her that she should be preparing for her independence and learning to be accountable to herself for her actions. She must have the courage of her convictions, as he lays out in a scene shot in the manner of a political rally and echoing Soviet realist cinema, so she can’t regret it later even if she one day changes her mind.  

They are all, in their ways, like the yamabuki rooting themselves in rocky ground and growing in the shade each discovering something new that allows them to continue despite the continual disappointment of their lives. Shot in a grainy 4:3 16mm, the film emphasises the aura of impossibility that enshrouds the town as if it were somehow trapped in the past, but equally lends it a kind of elegiac quality peppered with the colourful yellow of the yamabuki flowers which suggest that it is possible to blossom even under the constant gloom of a continually uncertain existence.

Yamabuki screens at New York’s IFC Center on Feb. 10 & 11 as part of ACA Cinema Project’s New Films From Japan. Director Juichiro Yamasaki will be present at each screening for a Q&A.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Small, Slow But Steady (ケイコ 目を澄ませて, Sho Miyake, 2022)

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Part way through Sho Miyake’s empathetic character study Small, Slow But Steady (ケイコ 目を澄ませて, Keiko, Me wo Sumasete), an older man visits a doctor and is told that though he may think there is nothing really to worry about at the moment, a tiny drop of water falling steadily can soon make its mark in stone. It’s in one sense the small, slow, but steady stresses of everyday life that have eaten away at the soul of Keiko (Yukino Kishii), an aspiring boxer who is fast losing the will the fight. Yet it is also a small, slow, but steady process that allows her to begin moving again, climbing a new hill towards the next bout no longer so afraid of leaving the safety of the familiar. 

Deaf since birth, Keiko became a professional boxer two years previously and makes ends meet with a part-time job in housekeeping at an upscale hotel. Miyake often positions her as in a way free of the frenetic nature of the noisy city, unaffected by the shouts of rude passersby and unlike the men at her boxing gym never subjected to angry rants from her coaches. Yet it’s also at times as if she feels a kind of loneliness in the minor rejections of an indifferent society which often fails to cater to her difference. Few people are able to sign, even those at her gym haven’t learned, while others are sometimes impatient in her attempts to communicate. The restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic meanwhile only make things worse for her given that constant masking means she can no longer rely on lipreading nor can she hear the public health messages being blasted out in public spaces reminding citizens that there is a state of emergency in place and they should restrict their journeys to the barest of essentials. 

Then again, in the gym, she obviously cannot sign because the gloves her impede her ability to communicate. Nor can she hear the session bell or words of encouragement and advice from her coaches and the crowd. The chairman of the boxing club (Tomokazu Miura) admits in an interview that deafness is potentially fatal for a boxer, but that what Keiko may crave is a kind of internal peace in the surrender to the purely physical which allows her to empty her mind of everyday troubles. She may have taken up boxing as some say after being bullied as a child because of her disability, quite literally fighting back against a conformist society she refuses to beaten by, but has also found something reassuring in its slow and steady rhythms that allows her to reorient herself blow after blow. 

The chairman also says, however, that it’s not a matter of having a preternatural talent so much as a steady work ethic and above all a big a heart, describing her finally as simply “a really nice person”. “Why don’t you have your guard up properly?” another of her coaches asks her, while her brother having noticed there is obviously something bothering her tries to get her to talk, only for her to point out that “talking doesn’t doesn’t make a person any less alone”. With rumours the pandemic, along with the boss’ failing health, will finally take the boxing gym too, Keiko fears losing this final safe space but finds herself unable to stand up and fight for it. Though she had struggled to find a gym who would accommodate her disability, she is ambivalent when a new solution is found in an empathetic female coach (Makiko Watanabe) running a modern training facility who is learning sign language and keen to empower her in her own decision making rather than patronise or railroad her. Afraid of getting hurt, she takes a step back unwilling leave the security of the past for the possibility of the future. 

As Keiko reminds herself in her diary, self-control is the most important thing and the force she struggles with, suddenly losing her concentration in the middle of a match because the thoughtless referee keeps telling her to listen to him when he calls stop. In the end, it’s something quite trivial that sets her back on the path, a kind yet seemingly meaningless moment of acknowledgement from an unexpected source. Shot in a richly textured 16mm, Miyake captures Keiko’s isolated everyday with stunning clarity finding her alone amid the noisy city staring into space and looking for direction. Using intertitles to translate sign language his composition mimics that of a silent movie and lends an almost elegiac quality to the moribund boxing gym as it becomes an accidental victim of its times but ends on a note of quite resilience in the small, slow, but steady rhythms of gentle forward motion. 

Small, Slow But Steady screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Gift of Fire (太陽の子, Hiroshi Kurosaki, 2020)

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“What can we do? It’s for the victory of our country” one woman stoically laments as her family home is demolished in an attempt to mitigate the damage from potential aerial bombing in Hiroshi Kurosaki’s wartime drama, Gift of Fire (太陽の子, Taiyo no Ko). A co-production between Japanese broadcaster NHK and American distributor Eleven Arts, Kurosaki’s ambivalent interrogation of the price of progress asks some difficult questions about scientific ethics while simultaneously suggesting we may have been stoking a fire we cannot fully control in a bid for a technological evolution which has become unavoidably politicised. 

The hero, Shu (Yuya Yagira), is an idealistic young man who excels at running experiments. He has been spared the draft because his work has been deemed essential for the war effort as he is part of the research team at Kyoto University working on the development of an atomic bomb. A theoretical thinker, Shu has not fully considered the implications of the project and largely views it as a problem they are trying to solve in the name of science rather than a concerted attempt to create a super weapon with the potential to bring death and destruction to the entire world. 

Others meanwhile are beginning to question the ethical dimensions of their work. The team is equipped with a shortwave radio receiving the American broadcasts and is fully aware that Japan is losing the war. There are frequent power outages which interfere with their research, while food shortages are also becoming a problem. The potter Shu has been visiting in order to acquire Uranium usually used for a yellow glaze tells him that he rarely needs to use colour anymore because the vast majority of his output is plain white funerary urns for boys who come back as bones. Some of the scientists feel guilty that they are living in relative safety while other young men their age are fighting and dying on the front line, while others wonder if working on the bomb, which will almost certainly not be finished in time, is the best way to help them. They also wonder if scientists should be involved in the creation of weapons at all, but their mentor Arakatsu (Jun Kunimura) justifies the project under the rationale that they aren’t just trying to make a bomb but to unlock the power of the atom and harness its intrinsic energy to take humanity into a brave new world. 

As it turns out, Arakatsu may not have expected the project to succeed but was in a sense using it in order to protect his students by ensuring they would be exempt from the draft. Another senior researcher meanwhile points out the Americans are also working on a bomb, and if they don’t finish it first the Russians will. Arakatsu claims this war, like most, is about energy but nuclear energy may be infinite and therefore its discovery has the potential to end human conflict forevermore. Still, it’s difficult for Shu reconcile himself to the reality of what he was working on seeing the devastation inflicted on Hiroshima. The scientists are plunged into a deep sense of guilt and despair that they failed to prevent this tragedy, but also perhaps relief in knowing they were not responsible for inflicting it on the city of San Francisco as had been the plan. 

Arakatsu claims he wants to change the world through science, a sense of purpose that appeals to Shu even while he remains firmly in the present moment. His childhood friend, Setsu (Kasumi Arimura), however is looking far ahead already thinking about what to do when the war is over. Seeing through the wartime propaganda disturbed by the answers the high school girls co-opted to fill-in at her factory give when asked about their dreams that all they want is to marry as soon as possible and raise children to serve the nation, she aims to educate. Shu’s brother Hiroyuki (Haruma Miura), meanwhile, is a conflicted soldier filled with guilt for having survived so long crying out that he can’t be the only one not to die. The theory that nothing is ever created or destroyed becomes an odd kind of justification, yet Shu is also forced to admit that destruction can be “beautiful” while claiming that scientific progress is a body already in motion which cannot be stopped. “The nature of science transcends humanity” Shu is told by an accented voice speaking in English, insisting that the bomb is merely another stop on the inevitable march of progress in the great chain reaction of history. Kurosaki’s melancholy drama preserves both the beauty and wonder of scientific discovery as well as its terrible ferocity but offers few answers as to the extent of its responsibilities. 

Gift of Fire screens in Chicago on Sept. 16 as part of the 13th season of Asian Pop-Up Cinema before opening at cinemas across the US on Nov. 12 courtesy of Eleven Arts.

US trailer (English subtitles)