Tag: Misako Konno

Golden Partners (黄金のパートナー, Kiyoshi Nishimura, 1979)

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Kiyoshi Nishimura began his career in the action genre with a series of paranoid thrillers so it feels particularly odd to see him tackle similar themes in such a breezy, lighthearted way as 1979’s Golden Partners (黄金のパートナー, Ogon no Partner). Though based on a novel by Kyotaro Nishimura, the film seems to have been envisioned as an homage to Robert Enrico’s Les Aventuriers in following two men and a young woman on a quest to track down a missing person and also find a large amount of gold supposedly contained in a downed submarine. 

Kosuke (Tomokazu Miura) is a rather aimless young man who lives on a fishing boat and has a career as a freelance photographer taking photos of things people would rather weren’t photographed, while his best friend Shusaku (Tatsuya Fuji) is a motorcycle-riding policeman who has a strong sense of civic duty yet mostly spends his time giving out tickets to locals traveling slightly over the speed limit. They’re both good friends with the landlord at the Polestar bar whom they affectionately refer to as Pops (Taiji Tonoyama). Pops has let them run up a significant tab even though he doesn’t appear to have any other customers. In any case, their aimless days are interrupted when Kosuke begins hearing a strange SOS message but can’t seem to identify where it’s coming from to be able to help. Meanwhile, a young woman arrives looking for Pops and explains that her father, an old friend of his, has gone missing which may be connected to the mysterious stash of gold bars Pops is fond of talking about every time he has too much to drink. 

Figuring out that the SOS message is using a code employed by the Imperial Navy during the war, the trio embark on trying to solve the mystery partly to help the young woman, Yukibe (Misako Konno), and partly because they want to find the gold. Basically a buddy movie, the film has a childlike quality as it mainly follows the trio hanging out on the beach in Saipan solving puzzles and getting into minor arguments. Things take a slightly darker turn when Shusaku decides to stay on even after his paid leave from the police force ends despite realising it’s unlikely they’re going to find the gold bars or even figure out what’s happened to Yukibe’s father. Having realised that Yukibe likes Kosuke and despite his own feelings for her, he’s beginning to feel like a third wheel but in the end cannot bring himself to leave this unending holiday adventure.

But after making a shocking discovery, what they stumble on is a wartime conspiracy in which a corrupt spy killed the other men assigned to transport the gold and took it for himself. He then used it to become a rich and powerful man in post-war Japan, apparently suffering no consequences for his actions hinting at the essential corruption of the post-war society. Realising he likely can’t be prosecuted nor would justice really be served if he went to prison for a few years, they decide on blackmail as their way of recovering the gold little realising how far someone who has killed before will go to protect their secrets. Nevertheless, despite the conspiratorial overtones the atmosphere remains largely cartoonish rather than dark or threatening right up until another tragedy occurs and brings the whole thing to an end.

This laidback sensibility is aided by the soundtrack provided by Takao Kisugi who briefly appears at the end of the film as his city pop folk songs run constantly throughout. Nishimura’s use of a ghostly zero fighter as the gang investigate the former airbase on Saipan proves slightly uncomfortable though ties in with some ghostly imagery as an evocation of a past that’s apparently still very present and largely unresolved. In any case, like a classic children’s adventure story the film does not particularly engage with its larger themes but concentrates on the trio’s attempts to solve the mystery along with their zany plans and crazy stunts culminating in the guys parachuting out of a private plane after aiming it right at that of the bad guys in a moment of extreme irony. A little bit sad and more tragic than it perhaps ought to be, the film is nevertheless a warmhearted tale of male friendship, the childish glee of solving a mystery, and the satisfaction of getting one over on the bad guys even if it comes at a very high price.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Young Black Jack (ヤング ブラック・ジャック, Kentaro Otani, 2011)

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The Black Jack of Osamu Tezuka’s classic manga is a morally ambiguous figure who cultivates an image of callousness through asking for exorbitant sums to cure often desperate people, but in reality will usually treat seriously ill patients if touched by their plight or is content to collect the money from another source ensuring a kind of social justice is done. A spin-off manga written by Yoshiaki Tabata and illustrated by Yugo Okuma, Young Black Jack (ヤング ブラック・ジャック), was published from 2011 to 2019 and was set in the 1960s when Black Jack was gifted young medical student living through a politically turbulent era. 

Broadcast in 2011, this television special meanwhile updates the action to the present day while acting as a kind of double origin story if one set in a more realistic world. As a nine-year-old boy, Black Jack asks his mother to meet him by the Christmas display in a local shopping mall. Not having had enough money to buy his mother a red rose, he patiently sits and draws one under the tree while otherwise oblivious to the news being broadcast on a large screen explaining that there has been a series of bombings in the city and the next target is this very mall. Black Jack’s mother has become mute after a traumatic incident but tries to call out to him only for the pair to be caught in the blast. Touched by their story, the genius doctor Honma (Masachika Ichimura) manages to save Black Jack by transplanting his organs and giving him a skin graft while his mother remains in a coma.

The story then jumps to the present day with Black Jack (Masaki Okada) a medical student with an underground lair where he keeps his comatose mother (who hasn’t aged at all in 15 years) and operates as a backstreet doctor treating undocumented migrants and yakuza. Aside from emphasising his contradictory nature as someone who both treats anyone who requires treatment no matter of their social status yet simultaneously demands incredible sums of money for doing so, associating with these kinds of people also places Black Jack among the lower ranks of society which is something that niggles at snooty doctor Naoki (Yukiyoshi Ozawa). Naoki is sort of betrothed to Yuna (Riisa Naka), the daughter of the chief doctor at a prestigious university hospital who is herself in the middle of taking her final exams to become a doctor. 

Familiar to fans of the manga, Naoki is Black Jack’s opposite number. As he tells Yuna, there are two kinds of doctors. Those who save lives and those who kill. In the manga, Naoki was a doctor traumatised by his wartime experiences who often wants to euthanise the patients that Black Jack is trying to save believing that there is no way to save them. Having encountered Black Jack cooly saving a patient who collapsed in the street, Yuna asks Naoki what he thinks makes a good doctor and he tells her it’s the belief that medical science has no limits and the doctor is omnipotent. Yet he later says just the opposite, telling Yuna that she is being childish and of course there are limits to what medical science can achieve so in effect he’s giving up. Black Jack meanwhile does believe in his own omnipotence, even if that’s not always such a good thing, and is confident he can save any patient even if in the end he cannot save the one most close to him (perhaps because she wanted him to stop trying). 

The film does not however go into very much detail and only gives brief snippets of backstory such as Black Jack’s mother going mute after a shadowy man enters and leaves their home while hinting at potential future stories in his opposition to Naoki who objects to him partly out of snobbishness, and a potential romance with Yuna who has now shifted away from the elitism that coloured her family towards a more altruistic kind of medicine represented by Black Jack even in his aloofness. Nevertheless, the film makes no real attempt to transcend its origins as a television movie, not that it has to, and is hampered by an uninspired script and low production values which contribute to its relatively more naturalistic setting yet sit awkwardly with the more outlandish parts of the narrative such as Black Jack’s keeping his mother in cryogenic status for 15 years or being able to transplant all of someone’s organs at once and in under 10 minutes. Still, as a minor outing for the iconic character it’s entertaining enough for fans of the franchise. 

Four Sisters (姉妹坂, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1985)

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Four SistersNobuhiko Obayashi takes another trip into the idol movie world only this time for Toho with an adaptation of a popular shojo manga. That is to say, he employs a number of idols within the film led by Toho’s own Yasuko Sawaguchi, though the film does not fit the usual idol movie mould in that neither Sawaguchi or the other girls is linked with the title song. Following something of a sisterly trope which is not uncommon in Japanese film or literature, Four Sisters (姉妹坂, Shimaizaka) centres around four orphaned children who discover their pasts, and indeed futures, are not necessarily those they would have assumed them to be.

Yasuko Sawaguchi plays the third oldest sister and more or less protagonist of the story, Anzu, who is facing a very common teenage dilemma in that there are two boys (best friends) both interested in her and she can’t decide if she likes both, one, or either of them. Eventually, Yuzuki (Ichirota Miyakawa) wins out leaving his friend Oba (Toshinori Omi) depressed and on the sidelines. However, Yuzuki is from a wealthy family and it was intended he marry a cousin so his mother does some digging and discovers more about Anzu than Anzu knew about herself.

As it turns out, the four sisters are not actually related by blood as only one was the biological child of the goodhearted couple who raised them. Unfortunately, the children’s adoptive parents died in a car accident leaving their birth daughter, Aya (Misako Konno), as a kind of maternal figure to Akane (Atsuko Asano), Anzu, and Ai (Yasuko Tomita) though Akane was the only one old enough to remember their lives before coming to live with Aya and her family. The rediscovery of the truth knocks both younger girls for six, especially as Anzu’s birth mother has reappeared and presents an existential threat to their insular family of four.

Set once again set in a peaceful, countryside town, Four Sisters revisits many of Obayashi’s constant concerns in its evocation of memory, mislaid truth, and the need to come to terms with the past in order to go on living in the present. The four young women are each very different, but bound tightly together by their shared experience, including the recent loss of their parents. Anzu’s discovery threatens to destroy the family firstly through the exposure of a lie (or, what is really an omission of truth), and secondly to speed up the inevitable fracturing as she begins to seek a new life and eventually family of her own. Though Akane has been able to forge a career for herself (less pleasant part-time work aside), she rightly points out that in becoming their maternal figure, Aya has in a sense lost or rejected the opportunity to pursue her own happiness. The sisters’ bond is tight and near unbreakable, but it’s also, in a sense, constraining.

Obayashi begins the picture with in a polaroid-like frame in which the two boys declare their intentions to duel for Anzu’s affections. As the film moves on, Obayshi returns to these intertitle-like captions particularly in bookending the various seasons throughout which the film turns. Though not as radically as in some of his other work, Obayashi once again uses colour filtering as a highlighting tool which is most obvious towards the end as the edges of the screen start to blur, greying out everything other than our central heroines. However, other sequences take place in a noticeably expressionist environment with extreme colour contrasted backgrounds and unreal, star filled skies and Obayashi also allows the real world weather with its storms and raging rivers to dictate the mood.

Four Sisters is, at heart, a family drama though one seen through a slightly distorted mirror. The four girls are indeed a unit which would inevitably have to split or stagnate in the normal order of things but the bonds are strong enough to withstand the unusual amount of pressure placed on them, enabling the sisters to move on with their individual lives whilst remaining close. Obayashi keeps things relatively low key (by his own standards) but gently builds a melancholy, nostalgic tone filled with loss and regret yet also with hope for the future. Beautifully shot, with Obayashi’s characteristically unusual use of imagery and wistful, ethereal atmosphere Four Sisters may not be among the director’s most experimental efforts but does provide a warm tale of love lost and gained in the lives of four ordinary women.