“You may not be okay, but neither is anyone else,” a well-meaning young woman advises neatly encapsulating the world of the Toyoko kids in Makoto Nagahisa’s second feature, Burn (炎上, Enjo). A little less anarchic than his debut We Are Little Zombies, the film is one of several exploring the fate of these displaced teens the media has often liked to demonise as means of deflecting the fact that society has largely failed them and the adults who should be helping often only make things worse.
This contrast is clear in the opening scenes in which Jurie’s (Nana Mori) Christian parents sing a hymn about the world being full of light, but Jurie’s father (Kanji Furutachi) is a crazed authoritarian who beats her and her sister with a belt while insisting that Jurie’s persistent stammer is a reflection of her “tainted soul”. Ironically, asking her sister if she believes in God, Jurie starts to pray for her father’s death. “If God exists, He took his fucking time,” she quips when her father finally drops dead a few years later. But the abuse doesn’t end. Her mother takes her father’s place and begins to beat them just as she was beaten.
Shinjuku, is one sense, a place full of light given its brightness and shining signs, but in the real world you can’t have light without shadow. After running away, Jurie is taken in by a community of similarly displaced teens led by an adult Fagin-like character known as Kami (Wataru Ichinose), which is ironically the same as the word for “God”. He describes himself as a guardian angel who whose job it is to make everyone feel safe, yet there’s something disingenuous about his warm-hearted claims that this is a place that accepts everyone and that no matter what society may choose to reject, he is glad that they were born. His golden fangs seem to hint at something cruel and greedy echoed in his reluctance to left Jurie leave, insisting that she won’t make it in the real world despite having told her she needs to become independent.
Mitsuba (Aoi Yamada), who has a disability stemming from a traumatic childhood incident, similarly finds her attempt to find escape through a relationship with a host foundering. Ironically named “Hikari” which means light, he justifies himself to her in insisting that he’s a victim too having been abused by his mother as a child, though in the end Mitsuba’s need to be loved can only be satisfied transactionally as she deludes herself into thinking her relationship with Hikari is “real” even as he continues to exploit her. To earn the money pay him, she ironically takes to sex work and encourages Jurie to join her in an effort to earn a million yen and then go back to save her sister. One of their clients presents them with a strange-looking dildo that sort of resembles a wand used by magical girls in anime which they wave as though transforming, but later describe themselves as performing an exorcism after meeting clients.
The men that buy their services are just another symptom of an exploitative society. When Jurie almost overdoses and is taken to hospital, the police don’t send her back to her family but do place her in a childcare facility where she feels imprisoned. The implication is that society would rather hide these children away rather than attempt to help them. Jurie longs for the freedom of the city and escapes to return, but in the end discovers only darkness. The film shares its Japanese title with Kon Ichikawa’s adaptation of Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Conflagration, which is also about a young man who decided to burn it all down in protest against a profane world, though Jurie seeks escape from the collective punishment of the contemporary society along with the traumatic legacy of her father’s abuse. Nagahisa mixes iPhone social media footage capturing the kids’ world from their perspective with dreamlike imagery and a video game aesthetic as Jurie looks for a way out of the labyrinth of her trauma while setting the world ablaze in her mind. What she discovers in the ashes, however, maybe a renewed hope for the future and the possibility of a different kind of salvation.
Burn screens as part of this year’s JAPAN CUTS.
Trailer (Engliish subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 