Tag: Ruka Ishikawa

Qualia (クオリア, Ryo Ushimaru, 2023)

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“What is happiness for a chicken?” a recent recruit to a chicken farm wonders, though as she later points out they all meet a grim fate in the end. Yuko (Kokone Sasaki), a timid, quiet woman is much like the chickens she farms though apparently content with her captivity echoing only that it’s enough for her that she feels needed by the family who otherwise mistreat her. Actor Ryo Ushimaru’s directorial debut Qualia (クオリア) examines the place of women in the contemporary family along with its seething resentments and petty paybacks. 

On spotting one hen that’s being bullied by the others, Yuko places it in a protective cage and wonders if it will one day be able to return to the others while perhaps aware that it echoes her own circumstances. Having married into the family of her husband, Ryosuke (Kenta Kiguchi), she’s become little more than a drudge bullied by her embittered sister-in-law Satomi (Maya Kudamatsu) who walks with a cane after an accident caused by her brother which gives her some additional leverage over him. Perhaps to escape the sense of constraint he feels in his familial relationships, Ryosuke has been having an affair with a woman from a roadstop that buys their eggs, Saiki (Ruka Ishikawa), who has spun a tale about a false pregnancy in an attempt to get him to take their relationship more seriously. When that doesn’t quite work, she fetches up and the farm and is mistaken for a job applicant, overjoyed on realising the position comes with room and board. The unsuspecting Yuko is all too eager to accept her, almost browbeaten by Saiki into overriding her internalised compulsion to clear it with Satomi and Ryosuke first. 

Yuko is such a people pleaser that even after finding out about Saiki’s claims to be carrying her husband’s child she welcomes her into their home as if tacitly admitting her inferiority to this other woman who has done what she couldn’t do in conceiving a child. Much more direct by nature, Saiki cruelly retorts that becoming a mother is the key part of being a wife while making pointed and barbed remarks that express her desire to elbow Yuko out of the way and take her rightful place at Ryosuke’s side. After moving in, she quickly takes over the domestic space by requesting that she be allowed to help with the cooking and cleaning while Yuko takes care of the chickens outside, playing the part of the perfect housewife in an attempt to undercut Yuko’s place within the family.

Yet she also seems to feel sorry for Yuko and disapproves of the way Ryosuke treats her with his bullying manner and emotional coolness. Ryosuke had told her that he never loved Yuko and had married her only because his sister told him to, hinting at his feelings of emasculation amid this otherwise matriarchal environment where Satomi effectively rules the roost. The irony is that there are supposedly only female chickens on the farm which is how they ensure none of the eggs they send out are fertilised. If they find out any of the new chicks they take in are male, they get “removed” by conflicted farmhand Taichi (Chikara To) who is a bit of chicken obsessive and finds it hard to square his affection for the birds with this responsibilities as a farmer which mean they’ll all be “removed” when they stop laying and therefore lose their purpose.

The same is true for Yuko. Unable to conceive she’s now being replaced by a subsequent generation and has lost the will to fight back unable even to say that she objects to any of these new arrangements. Ryosuke, a rooster in the henhouse though one whose masculinity is scrutinised, seems to want a reaction from her but all she can tell him is that she treasures the memory of him proposing to her with all the chickens cheering them on and that she’s satisfied just with that one romantic moment. The question remains whether she too will one day find the courage to fly the coop and escape her bullying at the hands of the other women or otherwise discover a way to reassert herself that doesn’t leave her at their mercy. In any case, Ushimaru’s quirky, surreal dramedy eventually discovers that chickens too can fly if only they’re given the chance to do so.

Qualia screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Ichiko (市子, Akihiro Toda, 2023)

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If for some reason your name were taken from you and it became much easier to live by some other person’s name that you were compelled to use, would you be content to be them or be prepared to go to extreme lengths to reclaim your own identity? Based on his own play, Akihiro Toda’s Ichiko (市子) explores similar themes to his 2018 film The Name as the absent heroine fights to reassert herself just as we try to piece her together to a create semblance of the whole being we may never truly understand.

In many ways, it’s absence that defines Ichiko (Hana Sugisaki) who like the mysterious spirit of a fairy tale must be gone as soon as she is seen. Or at least, you could forgive Yoshinori (Ryuya Wakaba) for feeling this way when his girlfriend of three years suddenly disappears soon after he’d presented her with marriage papers. It’s not until he’s visited by a policeman, Goto (Shohei Uno), sometime later that he’s forced to admit he actually knew very little about her. He assumed she’d had a difficult past, and neither of them said too much about themselves so he doesn’t know if her parents are still alive, where she was from, or if she has any family or friends she might have gone to. What shocks him most, however, is that Goto informs him that on paper at least the woman named Ichiko Kawabe does not exist.

Flashing back across several years from Ichiko’s childhood to the present day, we see people call her by another name which she often tries to correct telling them that her name is Ichiko but it isn’t originally clear to us if this is because she’s being forced to live under false name or if she merely dislikes the name she was given and wishes to be “Ichiko” instead. In any case, she appears to have developed a healthy fear of letting anyone in thanks to her incredibly disordered home life. At times, would-be friends attempt to visit, but are either kicked out or merely horrified by what they see there and leave soon afterwards putting an end to the friendship. That might in itself explain why she may wish to be someone else, but in fact what she wants is the right to be herself.

Gradually it becomes clear that because of the way Japanese society works, Ichiko has been forced to live two lives as one and can live neither fully. It’s not quite right to call it a double life or to say that she multiple personalities but more that she cannot quite locate herself within herself and is increasingly distressed in being forced to answer to a name which is not her own and live someone else’s life for them. Later she explains that all she wanted was a “normal” existence though this is the very thing denied her in part because she is denied her rightful identity though there is something quite poignant in her remaining innocence. Her touching description of finding happiness in the scent of miso soup wafting from ordinary houses at dinner time expresses her desire for the comfort and safety of a conventional family she never really had or may perhaps have experienced for a brief moment in early childhood. 

Ironically enough, she exclaims that she likes walking in the rain because it washes everything clean though for her it will spell disaster in quite literally revealing the skeletons buried in her past and with them exposing the precarious web of lies on which her adult life was based in an attempt solely to recapture the authenticity of her essential identity. A further irony may be that the identity she ends up with may not even be her own but that of someone else who decided they no longer wanted theirs, perhaps because the world had also been unkind to them and so they did not understand its worth. As the policeman says, she did what she had to do survive whether that be lying about who she was or otherwise burying her other self literally or metaphorically. Dark and melancholy, Toda’s twisty psychological mystery has its poignant qualities but ultimately asks whether living as your true self is worth the price or it’s better just to accept the name that fate and society have dealt you.

Ichiko screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Shrieking in the Rain (雨に叫べば, Eiji Uchida, 2021)

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“Let’s change Japanese film” a duplicitous distributor tries to convince a diffident director though his “creators first” stance predictably turns out to be somewhat disingenuous. Inhabiting the same territory as Netflix’s Naked Director, Eiji Uchida’s meta dramedy Shrieking in the Rain (雨に叫べば, Ame ni Sakebeba) finds a young woman struggling to take charge of her artistic vision while plagued by workplace sexism, commercial concerns, and absurd censorship regulations but finally claiming her space and along with it her right to make art even if not quite everyone understands it, 

Set entirely on a Toei lot in the summer of 1988, the film opens with rookie director Hanako (Marika Matsumoto) locking herself inside a car with her hands clamped over her ears, fed up with the chaos that seems to surround her. How Hanako got the job in the first place is anyone’s guess, but it later becomes clear that she is in a sense being exploited by the producer, Tachibana (Kazuya Takahashi), who thinks a pretty young girl directing a softcore porno is a selling point in itself. Meanwhile, he’s teamed up with an US-based production company and its Japanese producer, Inoue (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), who seems fairly exasperated by the Japanese-style shoot and despite his pretty words is all about the business. For him, the main selling points are the actors, one a young idol star intending to boost his profile by getting into films and the other a veteran actress stripping off for the first time in an attempt to revitalise her fading career. 

Surrounded by male industry veterans, Hanako struggles to get her voice heard and feels under confident on set as they encircle her and bark orders she doesn’t quite understand. Her decisions are continually overruled by the male AD, cameraman, and finally Tachibana who always has his mind on the bottom line while Hanako’s inability to express herself to the crew results in endless takes of scenes that others tell her are “pointless” and should be cut despite her protestations that they are essential to the piece. A forthright female makeup artist (Chika Uchida) asks if filmmaking should really be this heartless as she watches Hanako humiliated by the chauvinistic cameraman who forces her to get on her knees and beg for help, while a more sympathetic grip (Gaku Hamada) later tells her that becoming a successful director has little to do with talent and a lot to do with the art of compromise. 

Nevertheless, Hanako tries to hold on to her artistic vision even while some roll their eyes considering the project is a softcore romantic melodrama revolving around a love triangle involving two brothers in love with same woman. Inoue claps back that film is a business, admitting that when he said creators first he just meant the ones that make money. According to him, anyone could direct the film because all anyone’s interested in is the actress’ bared breasts and the teenybopper appeal of top idol Shinji. Or in other words, it doesn’t really need to be good, it’s going to sell anyway. In any case, it seems incongruous to cast a squeaky clean idol in an edgy erotic drama especially considering that if they want to market it to his fans then they need to secure a rating which allows them to see it without adult supervision. Business concerns and censorship eventually collide when the rather befuddled censor puts a red line through some of their kink and explains that the actress’ third hip thrust has just earned them an X rating. 

Unlike Hanako and her similarly troubled junior camerawoman Yoshie (Serena Motola), veteran actress Kaede at least knows how to advocate for herself and get what she wants on set so that she can do her best work. Only in this case doing her best work means she wants to go for real with arrogant idol star Shinji who refuses to wear a modesty sock or trim his pubic hair to fit in with the arcane regulations of the censors board. Shinji is brought to task by aspiring actor Kazuto who is pissed off by his unprofessional behaviour while struggling to get a foothold in a difficult industry and apparently finding one through a romantic relationship with the producer which otherwise seems to be a secret from cast and crew. 

In any case a final confrontation prompts a rebellion against Inoue’s production line metaphor as the crew reaffirm that they are a team working together on an artistic endeavour not mere cogs in his machine. Reemerging in bright red lipstick, Hanako returns to retake what’s hers boldly claiming her artistic vision and taking charge on set before descending into an unexpected musical number. With a retro sensibility, the film neatly echoes late 80s production style with a cutesy background score often heard in movies of the era while posters for top Toei movies from the 70s and 80s such as Yukihiro Sawada’s No Grave for Us line the walls. A meta rebuke against the constraints placed on filmmakers by those who shout “creators first” to bolster their image but never follow through Shrieking in the Rain, is at once a homage to the classic days of low budget Toei erotica and an inspirational tale of an artist finding her voice in a sometimes repressive industry.

Shrieking in the Rain screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

colorless (猿楽町で会いましょう, Takashi Koyama, 2019)

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“I think I could capture the real you” a photographer pleads of a subject he has become obsessed with, little knowing the deeply problematic implications of his statement. Shot with a photographer’s eye, Takashi Koyama’s colorless (猿楽町で会いましょう, Sarugakucho de Aimasho), paints its heroes as just that, wandering zombies of modern day Tokyo as estranged from themselves as they are from others, but even as it attempts to draw similarities between their mutual lifelessness cannot help but reflect a misogynistic world view in which the conflicted heroine remains little more than an empty shell, a blank canvas onto which various men project their inner desires leaving her essentially robbed of an identity by an exploitative society. 

When we first meet aspiring freelance photographer Shu (Daichi Kaneko), he is in much the same position, kept waiting by an arrogant magazine editor who has stepped out of the office despite having arranged an appointment to look over his portfolio. When he eventually arrives, Kasamura (Kenta Maeno) rudely dismisses his work, claiming that the selection of photos he’s assembled doesn’t make sense in that it gives no clear indication of his style or intent and aside from that his shots are cold and lifeless. He attributes this lack of passion to the likelihood that Shu has never truly been in love, something which turns out to be true though as we later discover Kasamura is also a cold and cynical man who proudly proclaims the same of himself. Nevertheless, he hooks Shu up with a side job shooting publicity shots for an acquaintance, Yuka (Ruka Ishikawa), hoping to become a “reader’s model” as a path to fame. 

For whatever reason, Yuka seems to incite in him the passion which Kasamura claimed was missing in his work, becoming both muse and object of desire. She describes herself as colourless and wonders if there is a “her” that can be captured, while Shu assures her that he feels much the same but fails to appreciate the various ways in which he is attempting to colour her with his camera, filled with nothing but jealous anxiety when confronted by the possibility that she exists outside of the image he has created of her. The incongruities between what she tells him of herself, his own self created vision, and the evidence presented to him by others bring out an unpleasantly chauvinistic side of him which he perhaps does not even like in himself, abruptly attempting to stop her leaving his apartment without consenting to sex by threatening to withhold the data for the pictures he took, breaking into her phone to check her messages, and later feeling humiliated in realising that she may have hidden from him a prior (or current) life in sex work.

Yuka, meanwhile, remains a cipher. Unexpectedly interviewed as part of an audition she is asked to describe herself but can only reply in terms of the way others see her, answering only that she is often said to have a sunny disposition. We see her parrot back lines she’s heard from one man to another in an attempt to please him, as if wilfully erasing her essential identity to better conform to male desires in an attempt to keep herself safe but also perhaps betraying that she has few words of her own to offer. Yet in private we see a much less complimentary side of her in which she is petty and jealous, resentful of a friend’s success while she seems to get nowhere and, the film uncomfortably insists, willing to use men by exploiting their desire for her which is in essence a desire for a colourlessness they can dye with their own self projected ideals. 

Yuka claims that she does not want to know who she really is, perhaps afraid to know or realising that there really is no value in knowing because her existence is defined by male desire. Her tragedy may be that she isn’t cynical enough, unable to manipulate men to the same extent as her more successful friend, still longing to be known and loved for who she is even while insisting that she does not exist and wilfully misrepresenting herself to those around her out of embarrassment and dissatisfaction with her life. The story she tells in her interview implies a lasting trauma of male abuse which has caused a rupture in her sense of self, unable to grasp an identity other than that granted by others, but still we’re largely left with Shu’s resentment in his inability to “capture” that which cannot be captured in his desire to possess not only Yuka’s body but her image by replacing it with that of his own creation. A dark and cynical take on modern romance, colorless leaves its heroes much where it found them, floundering in an inherently patriarchal society itself devoid of the colour they each desire. 

colorless streamed as part of this year’s Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)