Tag: Nozomi de Lencquesaing

Tiger (Anshul Chauhan, 2025)

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At 35 years old, Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is beginning to tire of city life and thinking of settling down, but as a gay man in contemporary Japan, there are limits to how much that is possible for him. Inspired by real life stories from the LGBTQ+ community, Anshul Chauhan’s Tiger is more character study than issue drama, but explores the ways in which Taiga’s horizons are constrained by the way society receives his sexuality to the point that he finds himself considering entering a platonic marriage as the only real way to ensure a full domestic life with the possibility of raising children.

As someone from the “Friendship Marriage” organisation points out, even the recently introduced partnership system available in some areas of Japan is a long way from a legal marriage and is geared more towards housing provision and hospital visits. It doesn’t confer inheritance rights for those who own property, or even the right to attend a funeral if the other relatives object. Child adoption is relatively rare in Japan in any case and not generally available to same sex couples while even costly options such as IVF and surrogacy could be bureaucratically difficult given the way the family register system works. 

Though the woman giving the presentation seems incredibly angry about the weakness of the partnership system legislation, labelling it “a disgrace”, it can’t be denied that Friendship Marriage is essentially complicit with the heteronormative views of mainstream society in which it is still socially and in some cases practically difficult not to be married. After signing up for the service, Taiga meets a woman who is half-Iranian and grew up in Tehran. It doesn’t occur to him that her decision to come to Japan was not made entirely freely and that she cannot safely return there without the threat of violence. Taiga may feel himself constrained, but he won’t be arrested or tortured solely for existing as a gay man. Nevertheless, he faces reduced options when it comes to employment and has never revealed his sexuality to his father fearing that he will reject or disown him.

Tensions come to a head, as they so often do, when the matter of inheritance is raised. Taiga’s sister Minami (Maho Nonami) is aware of his sexuality though does not seem altogether accepting and is resentful of his life in Tokyo which she assumes to be aimless and free of responsibility while she has had to shoulder the burden of caring for their ageing father alone. It’s obvious that she has been banking on inheriting the family home and is resentful on hearing their father has suggested leaving it to Taiga on the condition that he marries and has children, knowing that this is something that is not possible in contemporary Japan. The implication is that Taiga had no choice but to leave his home town in order to lead a more authentic life and essentially develops two opposing personas, that of “Tiger” the aspiring porn star and “Taiga” the would-be-family man. 

Minami later wields this duality against him, asking him to baby-sit her daughter Kaede to whom he is especially close, while threatening to out him to their father if he doesn’t agree to give up his right to the domestic space represented by their family home. His former lover, Koji (Yuya Endo), has entered a conventional heterosexual marriage without disclosing his sexuality to his wife and is riddled with regrets over not leaving with Taiga and trying to start a domestic life in the city as a gay couple. The Friendship Marriage system removes the element of betrayal, but also elides authenticity in providing a mechanism for each partner to fulfil social and parental expectation while avoiding disclosing their sexuality, and equally prevents them from enjoying a full and loving domestic relationship with a same-sex partner.

The film never particularly suggests that there is anything wrong with the way Taiga is living in Tokyo nor with his desire to get into gay porn, but merely highlights the sense of emptiness he feels as someone denied the possibility a full domestic life. There is after all a kind of age cap involved in his life as a sex worker working at a men-only massage parlour which he may fast be approaching even aside from the clients who like to exorcise their own sense of powerless by paying money to abuse and humiliate him. In the end, all he’s left with is an uncertain liminal space living as a literal stand-in marooned on the sidelines with no place to call his own.

Tiger screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Tiger Production Partners

All the Songs We Never Sang (Chris Rudz, 2023)

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A young woman finds herself diving into the past after receiving a less than enthusiastic welcome on visiting her mother’s island home in Chris Rudz’s gentle indie drama, All the Songs We Never Sang. As the title implies, the film is as much about time wasted in bitterness as it is about the surreality of life on a small island where pearl diving is still a dominant force in the local economy.

17-year-old Natsumi (Miru Nagase) has travelled to Kojima in search of her estranged aunt, Reiko (Junko Kano), her mother’s twin sister, only as it turns out Reiko is a strange and embittered woman who is only ever comfortable in the water. She grudgingly allows Natsumi to stay but only to avoid further island gossip and is unconvinced by her desire to become a pearl diver like her ancestors. As far as we can see, Reiko is one of a handful of divers left on the island and the other two are approaching old age. In fact, there don’t seem to be a lot of other young people around except for Shijo (Kai Hoshino Sandy), an eccentric boat operator and aspiring rapper with a nascent crush on Natsumi. Nevertheless, people on the island mainly remember her mother Akiko as the one who ran off with a fisherman and was never seen again.

Though the older pearl divers are kind to her, not everyone is happy to see an outsider visit and most especially rookie policewoman Yuka (Aoi Shono) who according to some has been given grandiose ideas thanks to going to university on the mainland. She is suspicious of everyone and hungry to uncover some kind of major crime, quickly coming up with an unlikely yakuza invasion as a possible explanation for a missing boat despite the fact that its owner is known to be fond of a drink or two and may simply have neglected to tie it up properly. A patient superior, Sarge (Pierre Taki), tries to explain the nature of small community policing to her that she should integrate more with the people of the island so she can tell when something’s not right and know best how to help. But her zeal for preventing crime eventually leads to accidental cruelty in bluntly divulging upsetting news, smugly proud of her successful bust without reflecting on its implications or the necessary hurt caused by an improper application of her authority as a police officer.

In a way it’s this kind of insensitivity that lies at the centre of the film as it becomes clear that Rieko has wasted the last 18 years of her life in bitterness unable to get over an act of emotional betrayal. She’s sworn off music, which she once loved, and often retreats to her bathroom to plunge herself into the water only really at peace when she’s diving. Looking for a treasure her mother supposedly left for her, Natsumi is diving too, reaching into the past while trying to figure out why her mother and Rieko became estranged and looking for a sense of home and family she feels she’s lost.

That might be the real treasure that her mother left for her even if she has to go diving for it and will need some help to bring it to the surface. In some ways a typical “island movie” about a slightly strange place more or less cut off from time, Rudz hints at a sense of despair in living somewhere there is not much else to do than drink and sing but otherwise captures the warmth of the community most of whom are very welcoming of eccentrics and outsiders even if somewhat prone to gossip for a lack of other entertainment. Through the process of their reconnection, old wounds begin to heal and a kind of peace is found with the past which is in many ways filled with “mermaid’s tears” more than pearls of joy. Still there’s a kind of lament for the songs unsung because of hurt and bitterness, and for the lost love and opportunities that went with them that has its own sense of poignancy tempered by the infinite possibilities of making up for lost time amid the gentle island atmosphere.

All the Songs We Never Sang screened as part of this year’s Osaka Asian Film Festival 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Hit Me Anyone One More Time (記憶にございません！, Koki Mitani, 2019)

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Imagine if you woke up one day and found out you’re actually the national leader of your country and not only that absolutely everyone, including your wife and son, hates you with furious intensity. The hapless protagonist of Koki Mitani’s lowkey political satire Hit Me Anyone One More Time (記憶にございません！, Kioku ni Gozaimasen!) finds himself in just this stressful situation having lost all of his memories since he made the fateful decision to enter politics, rendered infinitely naive as he tries to keep up appearances while internally conflicted by the direction both his life and his country under his stewardship seem to have taken. 

Regarded as the “all-time worst prime minister” in Japanese history, Keisuke Kuroda (Kiichi Nakai) is known as a venal bore, a ghastly misogynist and all-round arsehole. To put it bluntly the very fact that a man like Kuroda could ever have become prime minster in the first place hints at a deep-seated rot in the political order. Aside from his gaffe-prone personality, the chief complaints against his administration are a sales tax hike and welfare cuts both of which target those with the least means, not that Kuroda cares very much about them. His big legacy idea is to build a second Diet building right next to the first Diet building only with spa facilities, illicitly teaming up with a childhood friend turned construction magnate who has been supplying him with hefty “donations”. 

After insulting the electorate during an outdoor balcony speech, Kuroda is hit on the head by a rock thrown by a disgruntled voter. Having lost his memory he regresses to a state of innocence from before he was corrupted by the cutthroat world of Japanese politics, now a nice, polite, slightly mild-mannered man who stuns his staff with his newfound consideration for others including a widely televised moment in which he stops to help up a female reporter who trips while chasing him in the lobby. Few believe he’s really changed, assuming this is some sort of bit intended to help rehabilitate his reputation. His new attitude, however, eventually fosters a new sense of hope for political change among his previously jaded, cynical staff who had long since given up hope of building a better Japan. 

Unsurprisingly, Mitani mostly avoids direct allusions to real world politics but adopts a mildly progressive stance as he sends a virtual innocent into the lion’s den of contemporary politics. It’s not long before Kuroda’s asking sensible questions about policy that wouldn’t go down so well with his (presumably) centre-right party including lowering the sales tax and raising the corporate, taking the time to greet constituents including a contingent of cherry farmers which contributes to his later decision to turn down a tariff-free trade deal for American cherries endangering diplomatic relations with the Japanese-American US President. No longer a ruthless political animal but a rueful middle-aged man who actually cares about ordinary people, Kuroda attempts to change the course Japanese politics largely by taking on the king maker, Tsurumaru (Masao Kusakari), his Chief Cabinet Secretary and the true holder of power in this infinitely corrupt political system. 

All sorts of sordid politics is on display from Kuroda’s womanising and a potential blackmail plot involving his wife’s affair to Tsurumaru’s yakuza ties and an even worse secret he would find personally ruinous should it get out. The ironic Japanese title of the film takes its name from that most universal of political get out of jail free cards, “I do not recall”, Kuroda’s standard response when questioned in the Diet about any of his extremely dodgy dealings. Instructing Kuroda that he should drop this “shallow humanism”, Tsurumaru can offer only the motivation that he wants to “remain in politics for as long as possible” while discovering that his old-school methods of political manipulation may no longer work when those around him find the courage to shed their cynicism and embrace a cleaner, kinder politics. 

Throwing in random gags such as a foreign minister who can’t speak English and has large ears with a pot belly that give him the appearance of Buddha while taking minor potshots as the usually toothless TV media through his series of acerbic anchors only too keen to criticise the PM live on air, Mitani’s comedy is characteristically inoffensive with its mix of slapstick and goodnatured farce but nevertheless makes a subtle plea for decent, compassionate politics which puts the interests of the people first rather than those of the governing elite. 

Hit Me Anyone One More Time streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Talking the Pictures (カツベン！, Masayuki Suo, 2019)

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Famously, silent cinema was never really “silent” in Japan. As the quote from director Hiroshi Inagaki which appears after the end credits of Masayuki Suo’s ode to the early days of the movies Talking the Pictures (カツベン！, Katsuben!) reminds us, audiences always had the benshi to guide them. These narrators of film were often more of a draw than the pictures themselves, cinemagoers keener to see their favourite storyteller perform than the story up on screen. A relic of a bygone age, the benshi has often been blamed for holding Japanese cinema back as studios continued to craft their films around audience appetites for live performance, but as we’ll see even the benshi themselves could sense their obsolescence lingering on the horizon. 

Beginning in 1915, the film opens with a retro mockup of a Toei logo from the silent era though the studio was only founded in 1938 and therefore produced only sound movies. Shot as a silent picture the opening sequence follows a gang of kids as they make their way towards an active film set where a classic jidaigeki is in production, confused on passing what appears to be a woman peeing standing up against a tree, a reminder that early cinema was largely inspired by kabuki and therefore featured male actors playing female roles. This is a disappointment to young Umeko, the daughter of an itinerant sex worker, who dreams of becoming an actress. Shuntaro, a little boy obsessed with the movies and dreaming of becoming a benshi like his idol the marquee draw Shusei Yamaoka (Masatoshi Nagase), reassures her that plenty of films from other countries feature female actors as the pair bond sneaking into the local picture house together but as in any good melodrama they are separated by time and circumstance only to be reunited 10 years later when neither of them is quite living their best life. 

While Umeko (Yuina Kuroshima) is a struggling actress trying to make it in motion pictures, Shuntaro (Ryo Narita) is living as a “fake benshi” impersonating Yamaoka and others for clueless provincial audiences while the gang he’s running with rob local houses using the movies as a cover. Escaping with some of the loot, he rebrands himself as “Kunisada” after a favourite character from the silver screen and fetches up in his old stomping ground, getting a backstage job at the troubled picture house which finds itself at the mercy of the new outfit in town, a purpose built modern cinema run by local yakuza Tachibana (Fumiyo Kohinata) and his movie-loving modern gal daughter Kotoe (Mao Inoue). Like the film itself, the town is at the nexus of changing times. The Aoki cinema is housed in a former kabuki theatre with the staff dressing in kimono even if Shuntaro and his divaish rival Mogi (Kengo Kora) don suits to talk the pictures. The palatial Tachibana meanwhile boasts modern seating and has the habit of poaching the Aoki’s staff partly because they pay more and partly because no one wants to work with Mogi who is, in his own way, an exemplification of the ways the benshi can interfere with cinematic development in that he forces the projectionist to undercrank the movies to ensure they follow the rhythm of his narration and not vice versa. 

The handsome Mogi is still pulling in the crowds, but the ageing Yamaoka has become a melancholy drunk now convinced that his own art is an act of destruction, actively unhelpful in becoming a barrier between the audience and the movies rather than a bridge. After all, cinema is a visual medium, it shouldn’t need “explaining” in words. He’s actively standing in the way, imposing his own narrative over someone else’s vision just as Shuntaro is a “fake” benshi in that he merely copies the routines of others, adopting a “fake” persona while hiding out in the movie house from the gang he ran away from and the movie-loving cop (Yutaka Takenouchi) who’s chasing them. Yamaoka may have a point, the days of the benshi are numbered though there were those who argued the advent of the talkies was also a regression, the advances of the silent era squandered on the spectacle of sound. Nevertheless, filled as it is with silent-era slapstick, silly farce, melodrama, and romance, Talking the Pictures is a warm and nostalgic tribute to a bygone age of cinema and the men and women who guided us through it. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Masquerade Hotel (マスカレード・ホテル, Masayuki Suzuki, 2019)

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The thing about hotels is, people often go to them when they want to be someone else, so how can you be on the look out for suspicious behaviour when everyone is to some degree acting out of character? Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s best known authors particularly praised for his elaborately plotted mysteries. In contrast to some of his famous detective novels, Masquerade Hotel (マスカレード・ホテル) leans into his softer side, taking its cues from Agatha Christie in its ultimately cheerful exploration of the strange world of hotels while praising the detective acumen both of cynical policemen and eager to please hoteliers. 

The police are hot on the trail of a serial killer and, due to clues found at the previous crime scenes, have concluded the next killing will take place at the Hotel Cotesia Tokyo. To scout out the potential crime scene, the detectives have co-opted the hotel’s basement as an incident room and are preparing to go undercover to keep an eye on things upstairs. Dishevelled detective Nitta (Takuya Kimura) has been assigned to the front desk because of his English skills apparently honed while living abroad in his youth, and is to be paired with earnest hotelier Naomi Yamagishi (Masami Nagasawa) who will do her best to turn him into a first rate hotelman. 

As might be expected, Nitta and Naomi do not exactly hit it off. Gruff and given to giving everyone in 50m radius the hard stare, Nitta is a shaggy haired middle-aged man in creased suits and shiny shoes. The first thing Naomi makes him do is get a haircut which does wonders for his image, but also plays into the peculiar art of masquerade which defines hotel life. Nitta is in the habit of calling the guests “customers” which instantly irritates Naomi who has spent the entirety of her professional life learning to be deferent. She reminds him that in here the guests are in charge, they make the rules and therefore can never break them. Her job is to provide the best service, which means she often has to set her personal pride aside and allow the sometimes unpleasant clientele, the ones who like to come to posh hotels to throw their weight around and abuse the staff, to get away with being obtuse because that’s just part of her job. 

That’s a big ask from Nitta who is both a proud man and a justice loving policeman to whom the idea of letting people act badly is almost anathema. To do his job, however, he’ll have to learn to bear it or risk letting a potential serial killer slip through his fingers. What Naomi realises is that they’re more alike than they first seemed. Both of their jobs rely on an astute assessment of their targets, even if they come at it from opposite ends. Naomi knows that each of her guests is wearing a kind of mask, taking on a slightly different persona when they enter her hotel, but her job is to see past it without ever letting on. A good hotelier knows what the guest wants before they do and is always ready to provide it, that’s the nature of service. So Naomi trusts her guests and is careful not to judge them. Nitta, meanwhile, is a policeman so he’s trained to question everything and suspect everyone. His job is to unmask and confront his suspects with who they really are. 

They both, however got into this game essentially because they want to protect people even if she wants to protect them inside and he out. Which means of course that they can work together after all, learning a little something from each other along the way. Naomi, well versed in the liberties often taken by her guests, is nearly taken in by an obvious scam that only Nitta is quick enough to catch thanks to his cynical policeman’s logic. He’s also first to suspect that there’s something not quite right with a harmless little old lady, and though Naomi senses it too she’s minded to let it go and doubles down on being the perfect servant thanks to her animosity towards Nitta. That “not quite right”, however, proves to be a slight misreading of the guest who, like many Nitta encounters, is pretending to be something they’re not for reasons that prove perfectly understandable once revealed. 

But then, Higashino characteristically pulls the rug out from under us and asks if we haven’t been suckered in buying all those reasonable excuses. Thanks to his conversations with Naomi, Nitta begins to get a grip on the crime, while she struggles with her conscience after learning that her guests may be in much more danger than she thought. Staking all on justice, the pair of them vow to abandon their respective professions if a guest gets hurt, but fail to realise that the crime may hit far closer to home than they’d anticipated. Nevertheless, what we’re left with is a strangely whimsical admiration for the weird world of hotels where no one is quite the same person they were before they walked through the revolving doors.

Original trailer (no subtitles)