Tag: Rie Miyazawa

Seven Days War (ぼくらの七日間戦争, Hiroshi Sugawara, 1988)

Posted on by

“What’s wrong with a little happiness?” one of the “eight heroes” of Aoba Jr. High Class 1-A asks, retreating from the duplicitous adult world into a teenage paradise. Another Kadokawa teen movie, Seven Days War (ぼくらの七日間戦争, Bokura no Nanoka-kan Senso) adapts the first in a series of Kadokawa novels by Osamu Soda and situates itself very much in the throws of the Bubble era in which the young rail not only against a rigid, conformist society but familial disappointment and the enduring legacy of the authoritarian past. 

According to the principal’s assembly speech, at Aoba Jr. High the motto for the day is “intellect, morality, and physique”. While he’s busy talking, another teacher, Yashiro (Shiro Sano), is patiently going through students’ bags and confiscating things he doesn’t like, even such innocent items as hairbrushes lest they should be used “to attract boys” rather than to maintain one’s appearance as the school would doubtless wish seeing as we later see the same teacher taking a ruler to make sure all the girls’ skirts are at regulation length. A boy late for assembly is also taken to task over his hair, accused of having had a perm and physically dragged towards a water butt by violent P. E teacher Mr. Sakae (Yasuaki Kurata) who later beats another overweight student for not performing well enough on the monkey bars. 

It’s small wonder the kids want to rebel. Eight of the boys in Yashiro’s class suddenly disappear one day, seceding to form their own society hiding out in a disused factory. Discovered and questioned, their only demands are to have the bad teachers fired and for all the students to be treated equally, but as expected their requests fall on deaf ears. Mindful of the school’s reputation, the principal tries to calm the anxious mothers but his underling, Nozawa (Yasuo Daichi), cooly absolves himself of all responsibility insensitively telling the parents that their children’s actions are obviously a reflection of poor parenting rather than a reaction to conditions at the school. 

As crude as that sounds, it’s accidentally echoed in another of the children’s demands in that they reject the idea that “children are robbers of parents’ lives”. Many of them are dealing with some degree of familial discord, often caused by the socio-economic stresses of the Bubble era in which everyone works all the time. The parents of ringleader Eiji (Kenichiro Kikuchi) are always arguing because his father is never around to help out at home, claiming that his golf weekends etc are essential work activities while his mother complains she’s worn out expected to handle the domestic responsibilities all alone. The broody Hiroshi (Toshitada Nabeshima) resents his mother for never being home, forever off working and communicating with him largely through answerphone messages. Nakao (Ken Ohsawa), the most studious of the boys, complains that he doesn’t really like the subjects he’s forced to study and only goes to cram school to please his parents. Hitomi (Rie Miyazawa), a female student who ends up joining the group later, is often left to her own devices with her father away working in Mexico and her mother always off “playing golf” which she seems to suspect is a euphemism for some other activity. 

What the kids want is to be free to be themselves, rejecting the salaryman straitjacket the mainstream world seems to be preparing for them. This being 1988, it goes without saying that the older teachers were children themselves during wartime and the legacy of militarism seems to have endured in their extreme love of order and discipline which has also infected the slightly younger and especially scary Yashiro. The wartime echoes are driven home by the very random find of a WWII tank for some reason hidden in the factory which the kids eventually repurpose and weaponise as part of their resistance, fortifying their hideout with a series of otherwise non-lethal booby traps to keep the authorities out even after the principal orders armed troops in. In the final confrontation, Nozawa turns up wearing a WWII German uniform only to be humiliatingly defeated by one of the gang’s Mousetrap-esque devices. 

Their rebellion, however, remains temporary and goodnatured, culminating in a beautiful fireworks display that has the adults admiring their artistry, while they later appear dressed once again in their school uniforms apparently considering their next revolutionary act. A Bubble-era time capsule, Seven Days War has much in common with other ‘80s kids movies, but positions its contemporary teens at the intersection of the authoritarian past and the consumerist present each of which conspire to rob them of their freedom but in their own way fighting back for their right to be themselves in a still conformist society.

Music video (no subtitles)

The Cabbie (運転手之戀, Chen Yi-wen & Chang Hwa-kun, 2000)

Posted on by

The crazy freewheeling life of a lovestruck taxi driver eventually takes a turn for the contemplative in Chen Yi-wen & Chang Hwa-kun’s infinitely charming comedy, The Cabbie (運転手之戀, yùn zhuǎn shǒu zhī liàn). Despite the film’s sunny atmosphere, darkness does indeed hang around the edges in the frequent references to car accidents and dismemberment yet it seems to be something that the affable hero can live with as he narrates a series of strange incidents from his ordinary life while meditating on his zany family when faced with mortal anxiety. 

As taxi driver Quan (Chu Chung-heng) points out, life can be pretty strange. His taxi can sometimes act as an unofficial confessional as his fares take the opportunity to unburden themselves to a complete stranger in a confined space, confessing the embarrassing details of their lives and even at one point seemingly confessing to a murder. Quan takes it in his stride, feeling as if he is one with his cab, Ah Di, and duty-bound to deliver his charges to their rightful destinations physical and emotional. Yet in an odd way it’s almost as if we’ve become the driver in this story and Quan is our fare, breaking the the fourth wall to speak to us directly of his strange life and the circumstances which led to this present turn of events. 

Quan is however unusual in that he tells his mother and father quite directly that he has no intention of marrying, giving a fairly logical reasoning based on the fact he believes women do not like him and he is not apparently much interested in them. This is of course a source of anxiety for his parents, his taxi driver father also turning fare in ranting at an old lady at the convenience store about his wayward son before trying to awaken something within him by gifting him porn. His mother meanwhile, the local coroner, decides to give up on him while ordering Quan to freeze his sperm so she can have a grandchild with or without his direct involvement at some point down the line. 

In any case, Quan changes his mind on falling in love at first sight with grumpy policewoman Jingwen (Japanese actress Rie Miyazawa, dubbed into Mandarin). Taking his mother’s advice about making an impression (not necessarily a good one) to heart, Quan decides the best way to woo his crush is to get fined by her as many times as possible. Even so there’s an undeniable Romeo and Juliet vibe to their relationship given the natural animosity between taxi drivers and traffic cops, along with a sense of cosmic irony that feeds directly back into the film’s darker themes. So much of life for Quan is coincidence, an act of cosmic collision not unlike the car crashes that occur so frequently outside the taxi depot. Quan encounters Jingwen by chance and then continues to push his luck by meeting her again in similar circumstances until she gives in to his unusual ardour. Yet not all of these accidents end well. One of Quan’s neighbours earns extra cash turning up at crash sites and making sure that the family gets all of the deceased’s body parts, reaching under twisted metal to retrieve pieces of severed flesh while his mother is indeed a coroner with a severed head in a jar sitting proudly in her office. 

In the end it might be that Quan is a mere passenger of fate, relating his life to us as it flashes before his eyes while threatened by a weird fare. What begins as absurd nonsense comedy as Quan tells us about his crazy family and the strangers who climb into his cab eventually takes an unexpected, poignant turn for the existential even as Quan continues to closely identify himself with Ah Di which might beg the question of who is driving who. Madcap and anarchic, there is something genuinely cheerful in Quan’s often simple existence governed both by chance and the rules of the road lending a fatalistic pall to all of his otherwise freewheeling adventures. Things don’t always always go right for him, but even when they go wrong it’s generally in the right way. Fast-forwarding though the “boring bits”, Quan races us through his life in the cab before taking us where we need to go keeping it cheerful while preparing for the inevitable collision with cosmic irony. 

The Cabbie screens 20th October as part of this year’s Taiwan Film Festival Edinburgh.

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Sunday Runoff (決戦は日曜日, Yuichiro Sakashita, 2021)

Posted on by

“I keep choosing a perilous path” the heroine of Yuichiro Sakashita’s political satire The Sunday Runoff (決戦は日曜日, Kessen wa Nichiyobi) explains, “But that’s where change happens”. Change, famously, is not a common occurrence in Japanese politics where the same party has remained in power for all but a handful of years since its foundation in 1955. Part of the reason for that at least according to the reluctant candidate is the nation’s rigid social attitudes in the unwillingness to question the status quo, just going along with however things have always been done, while the main cause is perhaps corruption at the local level in the interplay between supporters groups staffed by influential local businessmen and their representatives along with the collusion of civil staff who have become too blasé about the murky nature of politics. 

That’s especially true for political secretary Tanimura (Masataka Kubota) who had developed a paternal relationship with former defence minster Kawashima who unfortunately is forced to retire from office due to ill health after suffering a stroke. Unable to agree on a suitable candidate to replace him, the supporters groups throw their weight behind Yumi (Rie Miyazawa), Kawashima’s middle-aged, unmarried daughter. The above lines are spoken during her introduction to her staff who find her strange and unconvincing, mocking her Western-style business speak along with her decision to refer to them as her “crew”. 

If “change” was what Yumi wanted, she’s almost certainly standing for the wrong party. Though not explicitly stated, she’s obviously intended to be standing for an LDP stand in and in the opinion of her staff at least her seat is so safe you could paint a face on a rock and get it elected. Their problem is that they assumed Yumi would be easy to manage, though it quickly becomes clear that despite having grown up in politics she is incredibly naive and something of a loose cannon. As she admits, she tells it like it is and doesn’t consider the consequences. She is not media trained and the secretaries, Tanimura included, do not really bother to brief her in part because they assume the election’s a sure thing so they don’t need to. As we can see from her introductory speech, she is essentially playing the part of a politician as she imagines it to be, saying things she perhaps does mean because she thinks it’s what a politician would say such as her offensive reply to a question about the declining birthrate to the effect that childless couples were “slacking off” and “not functioning as humans” leading to a protest outside her office in large part by those who had found her comments hurtful because they had wanted to have children but for various reasons had not been able to. 

It’s Yumi’s political naivety that makes her the ultimate foil for the secretaries and supporters groups as she gradually comes to realise she was never meant to be anything other than a puppet. After a particularly disastrous conference, one of her older male sponsors exasperatedly asks why they couldn’t have picked a better candidate. “At least choose a man”, he adds while one of the secretaries later snaps at Yumi that she’s way out of her league, should “know her position”, and that the only reason an “amateur woman” like her was approved as a candidate was because of the supporters committee so she’s there to do exactly what they say. Forced to apologise to them, Yumi’s face is framed in the lattice work at a restaurant as if she were in prison, a sentiment echoed by Tanimura when he tells her that she has “no choice” but to continue threatening to plant smear stories in the press if she tries to walk away or blow the whistle on all the corruption she has unwittingly uncovered in the local political office. 

That would include the giving and receiving of bribes in an all too cosy relationship with local business and particularly the construction industry. Part of the problem is that the civil staff will all lose their jobs if Yumi is not elected which makes it in their interest not to act with total transparency. Tanimura hadn’t really cared about that before, each time when questioned replying only “that’s just how it is” but slowing beginning to realise that it doesn’t need to be and really it isn’t OK. Despite her eccentricity and impulsiveness Yumi would as Tanimura can see make a good politician if not one ideally suited to a conservative party. Threatening suicide from the roof of a three storey building she decries political apathy in Japan, explaining that they need to remind the people that this is really about them and that politics is not pointless because change can happen while the jaded secretaries roll their eyes and giggle setting up a crash mat in the event that she is not actually bluffing. 

What she decides to do is try to loose deliberately, but everything she tries just backfires. A series of offensive racist rants far from ruining her reputation pick her up new votes from members of the far right who previously felt unrepresented while even planting false stories in the press that she is a drug user with a criminal record doesn’t seem to dent her approval rating. Just as Yumi’s comments about the birthrate echoed those of other gaffe-prone LDP politicians such as Mio Sugita, Yumi and a reformed Tanimura even film a fake video of her pretending to abuse one of her staff directly echoing that of Mayuko Toyota who was forced to stand down after an embarrassing video of her calling her aide “baldly” while beating him went viral, but her popularity only increases. As a last resort they release video footage of her father accepting bribes and have her deny it so it becomes obvious that she lied, but her dishonesty makes no difference to the average voter. 

The cynical secretaries had indicated that ordinarily speaking they’d ride a scandal out because another one will be along before too long to knock it off the front page. Yumi’s whistle blowing plan fails again because of collusion with the local media who despite sniffing around for a story won’t run anything too negative lest they lose their access to the halls of government. The secretaries then get lucky when a possible North Korean missile strike bumps the bribery affair onto the back pages, a video of the staff laughing and cheering their near escape even becoming a meme on social media. Yumi’s resentment is in rooted in her powerless, refusing to be a puppet for local bigwigs, but it may also be true that once she’s elected they have no real power over her and changing the system from the inside may ironically become a real possibility if only she herself can overcome her conviction that nothing is ever going to change. “This is not the world you expected.” Tanimura admits, “accept it and fight”. A throwback to the films of Juzo Itami, Yumi is very much the kind of character Nobuko Miyamoto might have played in one of her “woman” films if perhaps a little more cynical. The Sunday Runoff is decidedly more barbed if at least as pointed in its criticism of incestous local politics, but in the end does believe that real change may indeed be possible if only you’re willing to fight for it. 

The Sunday Runoff streams in Germany until 6th June as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

No Longer Human (人間失格 太宰治と3人の女たち, Mika Ninagawa, 2019)

Posted on by

Like a character from one of his novels, Osamu Dazai is remembered as a figure of intense romanticism, an image fuelled by his love suicide with a woman who was neither his wife nor the mistress with whom he had conceived a child. A proponent of the “I novel”, Dazai lived as he wrote, but crucially gives the hero of his final book, No Longer Human, a less destructive ending than he eventually gave himself in that he finally accepts his toxicity and chooses self-exile in the belief that he has fallen so far as to lose the right to regard himself as “human”. Mika Ninagawa’s biographical treatment of Dazai borrows the title from his most famous novel (人間失格 太宰治と3人の女たち, Ningen Shikkaku: Dazai Osamu to 3-nin no Onnatachi), but gives it a subtitle which pulls focus from the author himself towards the three women who each in their own way made him what he was. 

Yet what he was, in Ninagawa’s characterisation at least, was hollow. Late into the film, she includes a famous literary anecdote in which a young Yukio Mishima (Kengo Kora) turns up to a party where Dazai (Shun Oguri) is holding court following the publication of The Setting Sun and accuses him of being a poseur, a coward who writes endlessly about death but has no real intention of following through. That’s something of which he was often accused, having already failed to die as we see in the film’s opening in a love suicide in which the woman died calling out another man’s name. Intensely insecure, he carps on about being disrespected by the literary establishment, in fact using his final days and one of his last chances to pen an embittered screed against the famous authors who read but apparently did not care for his work. His editor despairs of him, resenting him not only for the debauched lifestyle which interferes with his writing but his essential caddishness that sees him both mistreat his loyal wife and use countless women as fuel for his art never quite caring about what happens to them afterwards. 

Dazai claims that Michiko (Rie Miyazawa), his legal wife and mother of his children, is OK with his affairs because it is “love in the service of art”. There is some truth in that, though as Michiko points out, Dazai himself would have no interest in a woman so passively self-sacrificing as that of Villon’s Wife. When the children catch sight of their father embracing another woman at a festival, she calmly tells them that he is “working” before pulling them on in embarrassment, putting up with it perhaps more because she has no other option than in respect for Dazai the great artist. 

Yet as his new lover Shizuko (Erika Sawajiri) claims, beautiful art comes from broken people, an idea which perhaps enables Dazai’s grandiose vision of himself as an unjustly dismissed literary genius. Just as Villon’s Wife was “inspired” by his relationship with Michiko, The Setting Sun is about Shizuko, only this time Shizuko is more collaborator than muse. He plunders her diaries and the most famous line from his novel, “Men are made for love and revolution” was in fact not written by him but stolen from her (she eventually asks for a co-writing credit but evidently did not get one, penning her own book instead). What she asks him for in return is a child, a strangely common request also made of him by Tomie (Fumi Nikaido), the woman with whom he eventually dies largely, the film suggests, because despite the longing for life that birth represents she pulled him towards death and he was too indifferent to resist. Dazai’s resistance, if you can call it that, is listlessness in which he has no desire to live but equally perhaps no real desire to die. 

Despite the foregrounding of the title, the three women are perhaps three paths he could take – the conventional as a husband and father, the radical as man standing equal with a woman who is not a wife with whom he births “a new art”, and finally the nihilistic “death” which is the route he eventually takes. With or perhaps for Tomie he writes the work he knows will destroy him in which he excoriates himself rather than her but, unlike in life, receives the gift of self-awareness and then lets himself (partially) off the hook. In Ninagawa’s visual complexity he is perhaps to an extent already dead, collapsing in the snow after haemorrhaging blood in the later stages of TB next to a red circle looking oddly like the flag of Japan only for white petals to begin raining down on him as if he were already in his coffin. We see repeated shots of shimmering water reminding us of his death by drowning, and for all of Ninagawa’s characteristically colourful compositions it’s the women who are surrounded by the vibrancy of flowers in full bloom never Dazai himself. On her husband’s death, Michiko can exclaim only (and ironically) that the sun has finally come out as she gets on with her life putting out the washing. Shizuko affirms that Dazai was the love of her life while asserting her own artistic identity in pushing her book which is an inversion of his. Meanwhile, Dazai has consumed himself, a cad to the last, overdosing on romanticism as an artist who fears he has nothing else to say.

Hong Kong trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

Seven Days War (ぼくらの七日間戦争, Yuta Murano, 2019)

Posted on by 1 Comment

“Youth is the liberated zone of life” according to the voice of experience in Yuta Murano’s impassioned anime adaptation of the cult novel by Osamu Soda, Seven Days War (ぼくらの七日間戦争, Bokura no Nanoka-kan Senso). Featuring a number of meta references to the ‘80s original and live action movie, Murano’s stylistically conventional adaptation shifts the action to Hokkaido and the present day encompassing such themes as economic strife, systemic political corruption and small town nepotism, migration and exploitation, but is most of all a coming-of-age story as the rebellious teens meditate on the costs of adulthood, resolving not to become the vacuous and resentful adults they see all around them who have traded emotional authenticity for a mistaken ideal of civility. 

Obsessed with 19th century European military history, high schooler Mamoru (Takumi Kitamura) complains that no one takes any interest in him and remains too diffident to confess his feelings to the girl next door, Aya (Kyoko Yoshine), with whom he has been in love for the past six years. Hearing that Aya and her family will soon be moving away because her authoritarian politician father has been offered the opportunity to take over a relative’s seat in Tokyo gives him the boost he needs, nervously suggesting that he and Aya run away together so they can at least celebrate her upcoming birthday the following week. Aya surprises him by agreeing, but rather than a romantic getaway for two she decides to invite several not particularly close friends from school, holing up in a disused coal refinery on the edge of town. Once there, however, they realise someone has beaten them to it. Marret (Makoto Koichi), the child of undocumented migrant workers from Thailand, has been hiding in the building after being separated from their parents when the building they were living in was raided by immigration authorities. 

Though the group is not universally in favour, they quickly find themselves deciding to protect Marret while trying to help find the kid’s family using both their ingenuity in fortifying the coal refinery and their youthful know how in weaponising the internet and social media to win sympathy and fight back against the oppressive ideology of the authorities. Yet Marret finds it difficult to trust them because they occupy a liminal space between the idealism of childhood and the cynicism of maturity. Marret’s family came to Japan on the false promise of finding good employment only to be ruthlessly exploited, convincing the idealistic youngster that all adults lie and can never be trusted. Mamoru, whose name literally means “protect”, does his best to save everyone but temporarily gives in to despair, confessing that he is just an “optimistic child” lacking the power to do any real good, only later coming to a revelation that the problem with the duplicitous adults they’re rebelling against is that they continue to run from their emotions and the pain of not being able to be fully themselves for fear of not fitting in has made them cruel and cynical. 

Honda (Takahiro Sakurai), the conflicted assistant to Aya’s authoritarian father, tacitly approves of the teens, affirming that the young always fight for the things they believe in but then rebels against himself in doxxing them, exposing both their identities (sans Aya’s) and dark secrets online in an attempt both to intimidate and to drive them apart. But the kids run in another direction. They elect to share their truths and in the sharing neutralise the threat while gaining the confidence that comes with deciding not hide anything anymore. The sharing is it seems what matters, a collective unburdening which paves the way for emotional authenticity but sidesteps the need to consider the fallout from the concurrent revelations. A heavily telegraphed confession of same sex love, for example, is accepted by all though there is no explicit indication as to whether or not is reciprocated save that is in no way rejected. 

In any case, the kids decide that being their authentic selves is more important than conformity and make a mutual decision to respect the same in others, something which is eventually mirrored in those like Honda among the duplicitous adults touched by the kids’ pure hearted rebellion. Necessarily, that leaves the weightier themes such as the plight of undocumented migrants, the casual cruelty of the authorities, small-town corruption and persistent nepotism relegated to the background, perhaps superficially considered seen trough an adolescent lens, but nevertheless products of the inauthenticity of the cynical adult world the kids are rebelling against. A heartfelt advocation for the idealism and universal compassion of youth carried into a more open adulthood that comes with emotional authenticity, Seven Days War leaves its heroes with the spirit of resistance, defiantly themselves as they step into an adult world uncorrupted by cynicism or prejudice.

Seven Days War screened as part of Camera Japan 2020.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Hana (花よりもなほ, Hirokazu Koreeda, 2006)

Posted on by Leave a comment

Hana poster 1The heart of the samurai movie lies in the conflict between human feeling and duty to one’s code, unexpectedly the code usually wins but its victory is often tragic. Following a series of bleak modern dramas, Hirokazu Koreeda took his first (and so far only) foray into the jidaigeki with Hana (花よりもなほ, Hana yori mo Naho), stopping to ask if the entirety of the samurai ethos was founded more on pride and a sense of entitlement than a supposedly high ideal of honour of justice, and if perhaps the negative legacy of the samurai era is one that continues to be passed on through toxic masculinity and the patriarchal primacy of problematic fathers.

Set in 1702, the action revolves around noble hearted samurai Soza (Junichi Okada) who has been living in a rundown tenement ally for the last three years looking for the man who killed his father in a pointless quarrel over a game of Go in order to avenge his death. Despite being a fine samurai and heir to a dojo, Soza’s big secret is that he’s not much of a swordsman and is also tenderhearted which leaves him doubly conflicted in his mission. Unwilling to admit he has simply come to like living among these “ordinary” people, and most particularly alongside the widow Osae (Rie Miyazawa) and her young son Shinbo, Soza has perhaps begun to slack off and no is longer looking very hard for his quarry, willingly allowing himself to be conned into buying meals for the cheeky Sado (Arata Furuta) who already has tabs running all over town.

Unlike the majority of samurai tales, Koreeda deliberately shifts the focus to the poor – routinely oppressed by an unscrupulous landlord who has even taken to selling their excrement for extra money just to make sure they are as thoroughly exploited as possible. These people exist so far out of the samurai world that it might as well not exist for them and its rules are nothing more than a ridiculous affectation when your primary concerns are how to keep yourself fed for the day and make sure your house doesn’t suddenly fall down while you’re out. These facts are well and truly brought home to Soza when, knowing he has little chance of winning anyway, he is challenged to a fight by jaded street punk Sode (Ryo Kase) who is keen to prove to little Shinbo that dojo skills mean nothing in the real world. Soza gets a pounding, but somehow wins people’s hearts anyway if only for being so easily humiliated and bearing it with good grace.

Lessons to little Shinbo, who has figured out his father is probably dead but worries that maybe his mother still doesn’t know, becomes a persistent motif as Koreeda embraces his favourite theme – good fathers and bad. Soza’s samurai code pushes him towards martial rigour and the necessity of obeying his father’s wishes which in this case would be hating the man who killed him and avenging his death. Hate is, however, something the fair-minded Soza finds difficult even if he seems to have a fair amount of inner conflict towards his father whom even his cheerful uncle describes as a joyless prude. Osae, sensing Soza’s inner pain, points him in the right direction in remarking that if all his father left behind for him was hate then that legacy would be too sad. Eventually, Soza remembers that there were other things, better things, that his father taught him and that he could pass on to Shinbo which aren’t about pointless cycles of revenge killing and century old grudges. He can honour the spirit of his duty without having to obey it to the letter.

Meanwhile, Koreeda deliberately contrasts Soza’s gradual confidence in his humanitarianism with the stubborn pride of the 47 ronin who are also hiding out in the tenement ally while they bide their time waiting to strike. Soza manages to effect his “revenge” with some theatrical subterfuge, whereas the 47 (well, in the end 46) ronin take theirs for real but not altogether honourably and end up becoming legend overnight, earning the tenement a brief reprieve after the landlord threatens to close it down through becoming a tourist spot. The title, apparently inspired by the death poem of Lord Asano whose seppuku triggered the series of incidents later retold as the legend of the Chushingura, alludes to the nihilistic pointlessness of the samurai ideal of a death as elegant as falling cherry blossoms, later imbuing it with earthier, warmer wisdom as an unexpected fount of profundity affirms that the reason cherry blossoms fall so beautifully is that they know they will soon bloom again.

Hana was screened as part of an ongoing Koreeda retrospective playing at the BFI Southbank in April and May 2019.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Her Love Boils Bathwater (湯を沸かすほどの熱い愛, Ryota Nakano, 2016)

Posted on by 7 Comments

her love boils bathwater

The “hahamono” or mother movie has gone out fashion in recent years. Yoji Yamada’s World War II melodrama Kabei or Keisuke Yoshida’s more contemplative examination of modern motherhood My Little Sweet Pea might be the best recent examples of this classic genre which arguably reached its golden age in the immediate post-war period with its tales of self-sacrificing mothers willing to do whatever it took to ensure the survival or prosperity of their often cold or ungrateful children. After “Capturing Dad” Ryota Nakano turns his attention to mum, or more precisely the nature of motherhood itself in a drama about family if not quite a “family drama” as a recently single mother is busy contending with financial hardship and a sullen teenage daughter when she’s suddenly caught off guard by a stage four cancer diagnosis.

Futaba (Rie Miyazawa) is an outwardly cheerful woman, the sort who’s always putting a brave face on things and faces her challenges head on, proactively and without the fear of failure. Her husband, Kazuhiro (Joe Odagiri), ran off a year ago and no one’s heard from him since. Having closed the family bathhouse Futaba works part-time at a local bakery and cares for her daughter Azumi (Hana Sugisaki) alone but when she collapses at work one day Futaba is forced to confront all those tell signs that something’s wrong she’s been too busy to pay attention to. Inevitably it’s already too late. Futaba has stage four cancer and there’s nothing to be done but Futaba is Futaba and so she has things to do while there’s still time.

Some people colour the air around them, instantly knowing how to make the world a better place for others if not quite for themselves, except by extension. Futaba is one such person – the personification of idealised maternity whose instinctual, altruistic talent for love and kindness knows no bounds or boundaries. Yet at times her love can be a necessarily tough one as she negotiates the difficult process of trying to get her shy teenage daughter to stand up to the vicious group of bullies who’ve been making her school life a misery. Faced with an accelerated timeframe, Futaba needs to teach her little girl to be an independent woman a little ahead of schedule, knowing that she won’t be around to offer the kind of love and support she’ll be needing during those difficult years of adolescence.

Not wanting to leave her entirely alone, Futaba tracks down Kazuhiro only to find he’s now the sole carer for the nine-year old daughter of the woman he left her for who may or may not be his. Futaba decides to take the pair of them in but little Ayuko is just as sullen and distanced as her older half-sister as she struggles with ambivalent emotions towards the mother who abandoned her with a “father” she hardly knew. Futaba’s big idea is to reopen the family bathhouse to be run as a family where everyone has their place and personal responsibility, working together towards a common goal and supporting each other as they inevitably grow closer.

Unlike the majority of hahamono mothers, Futaba’s love is truly boundless as she tries not only to provide for her own children but for all the neglected, lonely, and abandoned people of the world. Bonding with the little girl of the private investigator she hires to find Kazuhiko, trying to comfort Ayuko as she deals with the fact that her mother is probably never coming back, even taking in a melancholy hitchhiker whose made up backstory she instantly sees through – Futaba is the kind of woman with the instant ability to figure out where it hurts and knows what to do to make it better even if it may be harder in the short-term.

Like the majority of hahamono, however, Her Love Boils Bathwater (湯を沸かすほどの熱い愛, Yu wo Wakasu Hodo no Atsui Ai) can’t escape its inevitable tragedy as someone who’s given so much of themselves is cruelly robbed of the chance to see her labours bear fruit. Nakano reins in the sentimentality as much as possible, but it’s impossible not to be moved by Miyazawa’s nuanced performance which never allows Futaba to slip into the trap of saintliness despite her inherent goodness. She is evenly matched by relative newcomer Sugisaki in the difficult role of the teenage daughter saddled with finding herself and losing her mother at the same time while Aoi Ito does much the same with an equally demanding role for a young actress moving from sullen silence to cheerful acceptance mixed with impending grief. Yet what lingers is the light someone like Futaba casts into the world, teaching others to be the best version of themselves and then helping them pass that on in an infinite cycle of interdependence. Hers is a love of all mankind as unconditional as any mother’s, sometimes tough but always forgiving.

Her Love Boils Bathwater was screened at the 17th Nippon Connection Film Festival.

Original trailer (turn on captions for English subtitles)

Pieta in the Toilet (トイレのピエタ, Daishi Matsunaga, 2015)

Posted on by 1 Comment

pieta-in-the-toiletSomewhere near the beginning of Daishi Matsunaga’s debut feature, Pieta in the Toilet (トイレのピエタ, Toire no Pieta), the high rise window washing hero is attempting to school a nervous newbie by “reassuring” him that the worst thing that could happen up here is that you could die. This early attempt at black humour signals Hiroshi’s already aloof and standoffish nature but his fateful remark comes back to haunt him after he is diagnosed with an aggressive and debilitating condition of his own. Noticeably restrained in contrast with the often melodramatic approach of similarly themed mainstream pictures, Pieta in the Toilet is less a contemplation of death than of life, its purpose and its possibilities.

Having left his country home for Tokyo to become a painter, Hiroshi (Yojiro Noda) has become a bitter man, wilfully drowning in his own broken dreams. A chance encounter with an old flame, Satstuki (Saya Ichikawa), further deepens Hiroshi’s sense of inadequacy – she is about to open a solo exhibition in the very building which Hiroshi is currently engaged in washing the windows of. After having so sarcastically made fun of his new colleague’s fear of the rig, it’s Hiroshi who finds himself collapsing on the job and requiring medical treatment.

Seeing as the hospital have requested he bring a family member along with him for the results of the examination, it’s probably not good news. Not wanting to involve his parents, Hiroshi persuades Satsuki to masquerade as his younger sister only to restart an old argument in the waiting room prompting his former love to remember why they aren’t together anymore and hightail it out of there. Spotting a high school girl arguing with a salaryman she says has torn her uniform, Hiroshi decides to offer the job to her. Mai (Hana Sugisaki) plays her part to perfection but the news is even worse than he’d feared – aggressive stomach cancer requiring immediate hospitalisation and sustained chemotherapy if he is to have any chance at all of surviving more than a couple of months at most.

Prior to his illness, Hiroshi is a difficult man, permanently grumpy and irritated as if carrying a great sense of injustice. Despite several different voices reminding him that he had talent, Hiroshi has given up drawing in the belief that his artistic career was always doomed to failure. Intent on punishing himself for just not being good enough to succeed, Hiroshi’s decision to make window washing his career signals his lack of personal ambition, content to simply keep existing while a silent rage bubbles under the surface.

After the original failed reconnection with Satsuki who, we later discover, has moved in another direction using her society connections to advance her career in a way of which Hiroshi does not approve, Hiroshi’s illness brings him into contact with a number of people who each do their bit to reopen his heart. The most important of these is the feisty high school girl, Mai, who refuses to simply disappear from Hiroshi’s life after the awkward bonding experience of being present at the cancer diagnosis of a total stranger. As angry and defeated as Hiroshi, Mai’s difficult homelife has brought her untold suffering but unlike the brooding painter, hers in an externalised rage which sends her reeling into the world, looking for reaction and recognition rather than the introspective craving for disappointment and indifference which marks Hiroshi’s approach to his internalised sense of inadequacy.

Hiroshi’s hospital stay produces twin motivators from both ends of the spectrum in the form of an older man in the next bed, Yokota (Lily Franky), who enjoys taking photographs (especially of pretty girls), and a terminally ill little boy who remains cheerful, polite and friendly despite Hiroshi’s rather rude attempt to shake him off. It’s on a visit to the hospital chapel with the boy, Takuto (Riku Sawada), and his mother (Rie Miyazawa) that Hiroshi first comes across the statue of the pieta which inspires his ultimate, life affirming act which sees him turn the smallest room of the house into a new Sistine Chapel with a large scale installation recasting Mai as Mary, arms outstretched ready to receive her sorrowful burden.

Hiroshi’s life had been mere existence but reaching an acceptance of its end forces him into a process of more positive self reflection and a desire to leave something more permanent behind. Inspired by a few words found on the final page of the diary kept by the godfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka, himself battling stomach cancer at the time, Pieta in the Toilet puts art at the core of life as Hiroshi picks up his paint brush, Yokota his camera (albeit with slightly less than artful intentions), and Takuto his painstakingly collected colour-in heroes. Necessarily melancholy yet somehow life affirming Pieta in the Toilet offers a nuanced though no less powerful contemplation of life, death and art in which each gives meaning to the other, ensuring the richness of a life fully lived.

Screened as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2017.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Pale Moon (紙の月, Daihachi Yoshida, 2014)

Posted on by 3 Comments

Pale-Moon_MainDaihachi Yoshida’s last venture into human dynamics, The Kirishima Thing, took the high school environment as a microcosm for society as a whole. In some senses painting on a large canvas by illuminating the inner lives of these teenagers acting as both individuals and as members of a group, The Kirishima Thing was equal parts ensemble character drama and probing social commentary. Pale Moon (紙の月, Kami no Tsuki) is no different in this regard although it focuses more tightly on one individual and shifts age groups from turbulent adolescence to middle aged desperation. Set in 1994 just after the bubble burst, this gleefully cheeky (im)morality tale takes another sideways glance at the social norms of contemporary Japan.

Rika (Rie Miyazawa) is a demure woman in her early forties. A childless former housewife, she’s recently moved from a part time position at a bank to a full time job where she works as a kind of personal banking assistant visiting wealthy clients at home to discuss their financial needs and physically depositing their money in the bank for them. Efficient, reserved, reliable – Rika is the perfect employee, that is until one day she spends some of a client’s money because there isn’t quite enough in her purse. She takes the money straight out of an ATM and replaces it right away, of course, but a line has been crossed. It’s a quick step from a gentle misappropriation of funds to a series of interestingly decorated hotel rooms with a boy half your age, embezzlement on a grand scale, blackmail, bank fraud – the list goes on. How did it ever come to this? Yet, it’s the strangest thing – Rika has never felt more alive.

Money – it’s the life blood of capitalism. It makes the world go round and drives people crazy as they try to amass even more little bits of paper with numbers written on them. It’s fake, an illusion that we’ve all bought into – no more real than a paper moon (to go by the film’s original Japanese title), though we continue to set all of our hopes afloat on its surface. When Rika finally convinces her financially challenged young lover to accept her (stolen) money, she tries to convince him that nothing will change but, of course, it does. The dynamics fluctuate and money gets in the way, the toxicity of debt starts to eat away at any genuine connection that may have existed. The irony is, Rika is one of those people who steals in order to give away. It sounds selfless, even altruistic, but is in fact the most intensely selfish action that can be taken. “It’s better to give than to receive” goes the mantra of the nuns of the Catholic school where young Rika was educated, but they also council that charity should never have anything to do with your own gratification. This is the lesson that Rika finds so hard to learn, it feels so good to give – how can it be wrong to take?

It’s easy to say that the world has changed a lot in the intervening twenty years between now and the time the bulk of the action takes place, but maybe it hasn’t. The first thing that strikes you is how extraordinarily sexist Rika’s world is. It’s not long before she’s being asked questions about her marital status whilst being made to feel uncomfortable, alone in the home of her elderly male client. Then at the office her boss praises her efforts whilst sadly lamenting that women have more “tools” at their disposal than men do, which is both insultingly crude and a put down of her skills and hard work. Rika only gets her permanent position because another woman, an employee of nineteen years standing, has been forced out through a campaign of constructive dismissal because the big wigs don’t like paying higher salaries to older female workers but they won’t promote them past a certain level either. Her younger colleagues make fun of their “spinster” supervisor, Sumi (Satomi Kobayashi), who, only a generation older, had to make a clear cut choice between work and family and having chosen a career now sees the rug being pulled out from under her with the standard “transfer to head office” game plan in place to force her into retirement.

Rika’s home life offers a similar level of hope for the future. Her husband is probably well meaning, but totally insensitive and the marriage is at best unfulfilling. He pooh-poohs his wife’s thriftiness and her new “hobby” at the bank, totally failing to understand her motivation. At one point he announces he’s being transferred abroad so she’ll have to give her notice – it never occurs to him she may not wish to go, let alone that she’d refuse over something so trivial as her own job. It’s little surprise then that she’d so quickly fall for a handsome and attentive stranger. An “amour fou”, an old story but no less potent than it ever was.

Rika knows none of it’s real – that her temporary crime fuelled reprieve can’t go on forever, but that only makes her feel more free. In one telling episode, Rika is talking to a granny she’s in the process of swindling and remarks on her beautiful new necklace. What a shame it’s fake, Rika says, but the old lady replies that she knows it’s only imitation but she doesn’t care – it’s pretty, she likes it and she’s happy. That perhaps is the answer. Rika saw her chance and she took it. That takes some courage and whatever the moral outrage one might feel, there’s something undeniably admirable, even exciting, about Rika’s dramatic escape from the constraints of conventional social behaviour.

Pale Moon is receiving its UK Premier at the Glasgow Film Festival on 19th February so if you’re in the Glasgow area be sure to check it out!