Tag: Shigemitsu Ogi

Bayside Shakedown 2 (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 2 レインボーブリッジを封鎖せよ！, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2003)

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A big screen outing for a popular TV drama, Bayside Shakedown proved a runaway box office hit on its release in 1998. Five years later the team at Wangan Police Station are back and much seems to have changed even as the sequel cleverly mirrors the first instalment, but where the earlier film had satirically taken aim at chronic underfunding and excessive bureaucracy, Bayside Shakedown 2 (踊る大捜査線 THE MOVIE 2 レインボーブリッジを封鎖せよ！, Odoru Daisosasen the movie 2: Rainbow Bridge wo Fuusa seyo!) ultimately ends a defence of authority in the face of criminal anarchy. 

Five years on, the team are faced with yet another difficult serial killer case in which top CEOs are being bumped off and artfully posed in public places next to a rotten apple, once again necessitating the arrival of the guys from HQ. This time, however, Muroi (Toshiro Yanagiba), a friend of earnest detective Aoshima (Yûji Oda), has been pushed to the sidelines in favour of the big wigs’ latest favourite, Okita (Miki Maya), who has a much more authoritarian view of policing than many at Wangan are comfortable with. Meanwhile, Sumire (Eri Fukatsu) and Aoshima are busy with their own cases, a pickpocketing family and a “vampire” who bites high school girls’ hair and then runs off respectively, but all the office is a twitter over a love letter penned by their boss and accidentally emailed to everyone in the station because of a computer virus. 

Former Wangan guy Mashita (Yusuke Santamaria), who had transferred to the city, returns having trained as a negotiator but for some reason mostly doing profiling and eventually figuring out that their killers are likely disenfranchised salarymen made redundant by their companies amid the backdrop of a stagnant economy. With no hope for the future, they’ve turned against society and started an anarchist revolution as a collective without leaders. “No bosses, no workers. No ordering, no obeying. No firing, no being fired,” they explain of their principle of equality, adding, “when there’s a leader the individual means nothing”. On one level the film sympathises with them in recognising the pressures they’re facing and unfairness of the economic reality, while simultaneously condemning the idea of a horizontal society. “If the leader is good then the group is strong,” Aoshima explains to them though of course they don’t agree. 

Then again, he says this immediately Muroi has resumed command in the knowledge that he is a “good” leader precisely because he trusts those under him and gives them the freedom to exercise their own judgement in contrast to Okita whose authoritarian micromanaging is soon exposed as a cover for under confidence. A police officer is seriously injured during an operation because she hesitates to make a decision, while both Sumire and Aoshima are forced to let their suspects escape when Okita orders them to stay at their post trying to protect a woman she has effectively decided to use as bait. “Organisations don’t need emotion,” she insists, later irritated by the officers’ reluctance to follow her command when she simply instructs them to “replace” the critically injured officer as if their life were completely disposable. 

Just in the first film, Sumire and Aoshima are forced to question the value of local policing in the face of Okita’s elitism as she tells them that their individual cases can wait because the murder takes priority, describing them as “just local stuff”. “Punch ups and pickpockets, what a waste of police time,” she adds leaving each of them feeling as if their work has no meaning and is not useful to or valued by the community. Aoshima only gets his mojo back after remembering an act of kindness done to him by someone he’d helped in the past, realising that even small things have a positive effect on the society and are always worth doing. That said, he’s not especially sympathetic towards the teenage “vampire” victim largely because he only bit her hair but later gets on the case after more girls turn up with bite marks on their necks. 

In the end it is indeed the local which is good, Okita’s failure allowing Muroi to make good on his promise and allow the local police to do their jobs rather than being relegated to boring legwork such as traffic stops and trawling surveillance footage. Despite having rejected the leaderless anarchy of the villain’s horizontal society, Muroi’s first instruction is to “forget rank, forget class” and have everyone work together encouraging the local cops to help them identify the kinds of places only a local would know which might not be on the map and may be a good hideout for the assassins. There might be something uncomfortable in Aoshima’s insistence on the necessity of a leader in the implicit defence of the hierarchal society, but then Muroi is a good leader who can indeed be trusted wield his power well largely because he trusts those below him, while a weak leader like Okita who holds tight to power because they don’t have the confidence to wield it freely is worse than no leader at all. Once again ending on a note of ironic police accountability, Bayside Shakedown 2 takes aim at the inequalities of the modern society but ultimately makes the case for the value of compassionate local policing in which all crimes at least are treated equally.  

Original trailer (no subtitles)

A Quiet Life (静かな生活, Juzo Itami, 1995)

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“One person is not a tool for another” the heroine of Juzo Itami’s 1995 melodrama A Quiet Life (静かな生活, Shizukana Seikatsu) eventually writes in her diary quoting her novelist father but also reflecting on herself and her life in which some have indeed attempted to use others for their own ends. Outside of international mega hit Tampopo, Itami is best known for a series of anarchic comedies each starring his wife Nobuko Miyamoto as forthright woman tackling the ills of contemporary Japan from tax evasion and increasingly amoral capitalism to the yakuza and shady cults. Based on a novel by his brother-in-law Kenzaburo Oe, A Quiet Life is therefore something of an outlier yet once again addresses a number of social issues from treatment of disability in the contemporary society to the relationships between parents and children and the dangers of a rapidly modernising society. 

Middle daughter Ma (Hinako Saeki) lives in a large Western-style in the country with her father, internationally renowned author K (Tsutomu Yamazaki), mother and two brothers the oldest of which, Eeyore, has some learning difficulties but is largely independent. Nevertheless, when K, who is experiencing a moment of crisis that leads him to consider suicide when he is unable to fix a problem with the drains and has to resort to a plumber, is offered a job at a university in Australia Ma is left in charge at home and therefore responsible for her brother. Though the family fully accepts Eeyore, it’s clear the world around them is not always so kind. As they approach a centre for the disabled on a walk, others around them openly express disgust, suggesting they are a “bad influence” and wanting to leave the area entirely. 

Meanwhile as the film opens two children are locked together in a game of magnets, a collection of adults attempting to pull them apart by force. The shot is later repeated as Eeyore holds his sister in the rain following a traumatic and unexpected incident and demonstrating the close and affectionate bond between the siblings. Yet there is an uncomfortable suggestion from some that Ma is being asked to sacrifice her life to look after her brother who after all is unlikely to marry and will require additional care as long he lives, while she is perhaps slightly overprotective and wilfully self-sacrificing. “Don’t expect another human to sacrifice their life for you” goes another of her father’s lines, “to expect such a thing is the worst kind of depravity”, the family otherwise committed to the insistence that Eeyore has his own life and interiority which must neither be sacrificed, nor sacrificed for, for to do so would be to deny his personhood. Eeyore is not a tool for Ma’s charity nor is she a tool for the family’s duty towards him. 

Nevertheless even she is not immune to negative stereotyping becoming increasingly concerned that her now adult brother may pose a threat to the local community in his lack of understanding and inability to control his impulses. When a child molester is on the loose in the village, she is terrified Eeyore may be involved having read a newspaper report about a similar crime committed by someone with learning difficulties uncomfortably echoing the prejudice of the walkers by the disabled centre not to mention to middle-aged women who openly gossip about it in front of their house. Meanwhile, her own naivety becomes a threat when she allows a smarmy young man, Arai, to give her brother swimming lessons later learning that he has a grudge against her father who he feels “used” him to facilitate his art having bought and drawn inspiration from his experiences of being accused of a crime but leaving readers with the impression that he was a sex offender. 

Arai may indeed be trying to use her for revenge and at any rate is not all he seems even if the implication of her father’s story is that he wanted to sacrifice himself to save the young man. While K works through his artistic block offscreen aided by his wife (whom he soon forgets once he’s well), Ma has a series of epiphanies of her own over an eventful summer you couldn’t really call “quiet” even if there’s a strange tranquility in its anarchy. Going to some dark and unexpected places, Itami’s gentle dramedy veers away from the zany comedies of his earlier career but discovers a kind of serenity in the quiet of life of the siblings getting on with business of living in the sometimes hostile Japanese countryside. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2001)

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What would life be like if your every thought were audible for miles? Adapted from the manga by Makoto Sato, Katsuyuki Motohiro’s Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius (サトラレ, Satorare) considers how ironically isolating such a talent may turn out to be as the sufferer finds themselves withdrawing from others in embarrassment while wider society begins to resent being unable to tune out of their every inane thought or avoid being hurt by hearing something no one would ever say out loud even if they thought it privately. 

The “Committee for the Preservation of the Specially Gifted” is dedicated to protecting the so-called “Transparents” whose thoughts are audible for a 10m radius though they have no control or even idea that it is happening. They’ve started an extensive public information campaign to reduce the stigma held against them because as they claim Transparents are a valuable natural resource mainly as they all have super high IQ and are at the forefront of technological advancement. Then again this extensive campaign seems like overkill as there are only currently seven confirmed Transparents on record, but in a minor twist the campaign is necessary because it’s essential that the Transparents never find out that their thoughts are public, the first apparently having taken their own life because of the intense embarrassment of trying to live without any kind of privacy. 

This is the first ethical problem with the Transparent program which is curiously contradictory in its approach. The government could easily have said that Kenichi (Masanobu Ando), the sole survivor of a plane crash at three years old plucked from the wreckage when rescuers heard his internal monologue begging for help, had died and raised him in a lab, but instead they choose to return him to his grandmother in a designated Transparent town where they provide him with the illusion of a “normal” life while simultaneously micromanaging his existence. Their problem now is that he’s qualified as a doctor and wants to practice, but clinical medicine is obviously an occupation which requires discretion. Patients overhearing his “real” thoughts might not be helpful to their recovery, while he can hardly claim patient doctor confidentially when he’s likely to leak private medical details simply in the course of his work. Meanwhile, it tuns out that he’s already invented a revolutionary cure for athlete’s foot which is another reason why the council want to manipulate him into shifting towards research rather than clinical practice. 

That’s why they’ve dispatched military psychologist Yoko (Kyoka Suzuki) who specialises in Transparents hoping that she can find a way to bend him to their will, but gradually she begins to come to a new understanding of what his life is like even while he has no idea everyone knows what he’s thinking. For example, no one wants to date a Transparent because they don’t want the intimate details of their love lives broadcast all over town, while the perfectly ordinary thoughts which should definitely stay in his head on catching sight of crush Megumi (Rina Uchiyama) can’t help but make her feel uncomfortable. The entire town is forced to pretend that they can’t hear him think, which seems somewhat unfair, leaving him at a disadvantage and more often at not at a loss as to why someone might seem hurt or upset by him when didn’t even say anything. Meanwhile, much of Yoko’s role lies in gently manipulating him, the entire committee decamping to a summer festival in a nearby town so they can let him down gently by leading him to believe Megumi already has a steady boyfriend who is kind to children and the elderly so he’s forced to be happy for her that’s she’s found such a great guy and can give up on his romantic aspirations. 

The tone is in general admirably progressive in that it ultimately argues for a greater sense of acceptance for all minorities, but it’s difficult to square the positive message with the ways the Transparents are also being uncritically manipulated, forced to live a simulacrum of a life in an engineered small-town Japan which grateful to have them only for the massive subsidies they receive for local development in return for making sure the Transparents are kept in the dark about their condition so that the committee can exploit their genius as they plan to do with Kenichi after getting him to the research institution. Even so what they discover is that Kenichi knew what his genius was and only through letting him follow his dreams can they truly unlock it, while the committee is forced to reckon with the various ways they’ve dehumanised him, the chairman eventually referring to him as a person as opposed #7 as he’d always called him before. Somewhat contradictory and more than a little uncomfortable in its implications, Transparent: Tribute to a Sad Genius is presented as heartwarming drama and it does indeed warm the heart with this its messages of equality and acceptance not to mention the right to follow one’s dreams whatever they may be but never really reckons with its central thesis in which the authorities pat themselves on the back for being kind and doing the right thing while simultaneously exploiting those they claim to care for without their knowledge or consent. 

All Under the Moon (月はどっちに出ている, Yoichi Sai, 1993)

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Throughout Yoichi Sai’s All Under the Moon (月はどっちに出ている, Tsuki wa Dotchi ni Dete iru), an earnest taxi driver, Anbo (Akio Kaneda), repeatedly calls in to despatch to inform them that he’s become lost and has no idea where he is despite rocking up next to such prominent landmarks as Tokyo Tower and Mount Fuji. His confusion reflects that of the changing post-Bubble society in which those like him struggle to reorient themselves and find new direction just as the nation appears slow to recognise itself and adjust to a new reality. 

It does seem that many of the drivers at Kaneda Taxi have themselves lost direction in their lives and are living very much on their margins while their rather deluded boss Sell is behaving like it’s still the Bubble dreaming of building a golf course and then a hotel to accommodate 2000 people. The Korean loan shark working with him alternately tells fellow Zainichi taxi driver Chun (Goro Kishitani) that he’s acquiring wealth to use for the reunification of Korea, and Sell that they are all children of capitalism, “Damn Reunification!”. At the wedding Chun attends, the guests take phone calls to deal with business and each remark on the precarious economic situation while one suggests that the North Korean association he represents is probably on the brink of failure joking that he fears they may sell their school and pocket the money. 

Yet despite the economic turbulence, the country has been slow to accept the presence of workers from outside Japan and many, including those at the taxi firm, still face discrimination as does Chun himself by virtue of his Korean heritage. One Japanese employee also seems to face a good deal of stigmatisation simply because he has a speech impediment, while an older mechanic with a limp insists on calling an Iranian colleague by a similar sounding Japanese name while baselessly accusing him of theft. Hoso (Yoshiki Arizono), a man with mental health issues provoked by his previous career as a professional boxer in which he accidentally killed an opponent during a bout, is fond of saying “I hate Koreans, but I like you” while otherwise fixating on Chun as a dependable big brother figure and resentful enough when he starts dating a Filipina hostess, Connie (Ruby Moreno), who works at his mother’s bar to pound down the door of her flat and demand to be let in. 

Chun himself is at least problematic and especially by the standards of today as he tries a series of crass pickup lines on Korean women at the wedding and then eventually forces a kiss on Connie not to mention physically striking her during a heated argument. He also insensitively tells her about his family’s tragic history in the war emphasising that citizens of Korea were abused for slave labour while seemingly unaware of the history of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Meanwhile, he also lies that his father was killed by the Japanese and that all his brothers died of malnutrition whereas they are (presumably) alive if possibly not so well in North Korea. His hard as nails mother (Moeko Ezawa) points out that she came to Japan at 10, while Connie counters that she came at 15, though their experiences have perhaps been very different leaving them somewhat at odds rather than sharing a kind of solidarity as otherwise echoed in the marginal status of each of the migrants who are similarly othered as merely not Japanese yet largely left to fend for themselves while facing possible exploitation and deportation. 

Divisions exist even within the Korean population with guests at the wedding complaining that there have been too many long and boring speeches along with North Korean propaganda songs, claiming that it is discriminatory against South Koreans and finally being allowed to sing a South Korean folksong instead which is at least a good deal more lively. The gangsters leverage the idea of reuinifaction to carry out their scams while later claiming that they have been scammed by their Japanese backer who turned out to be more racist than they had first assumed. Yet as Chun says during one of his cheesy pickup attempts, what really has reunification got to do with them, the younger post-war generation who know no other homeland than Japan? He too flounders, caught between a series of names from “Tadao Kanda” to “Chun”, to the name which appears on his taxi license “Kang” the Korean pronunciation of character read “ga” Japanese which is only otherwise used in the word for ginger as pointed out by a slightly racist fare who goes on to remark that he doesn’t see the point of the “comfort women issue”. Chun has to grin and bear it while technically powerless despite being in the driver’s seat. Predictably, the prejudiced passenger also attempted to make a run for it rather than actually pay Chun his money. “I was born after the war too” Chun reminds him, “but we say after the liberation.”

Sai introduces us to the world of Kanda Taxis through a roving long shot around the carpark travelling from one employee to another before drifting up to management on the second floor. He returns to a similar scene near the film’s conclusion as the remaining workers playfully hose each other with water while literally watching their world burn. Yet for some at least it may be liberating experience, Chun finally gaining the courage to choose his own destination and go after something that he wants, even if it he does it in a characteristically problematic way, seemingly no longer worrying about where it might be taking him but content to simply drive in the direction of the moon. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Doing Time (刑務所の中, Yoichi Sai, 2002)

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Who ever thought that life in prison could be so…peaceful? Adapted from the autobiographical manga by Kazuichi Hanawa, Yoichi Sai’s 2002 drama Doing Time (刑務所の中, Keimusho no Naka) is a slice of life dramedy somewhat typical of the early 2000s save its unexpected setting in a state penitentiary. Unlike the average prison movie, the main thing that Hanawa discovers is that life inside is incredibly dull, yet he approaches his brief sojourn in this other world with anthropological precision observing and mimicking the behaviour of his fellow prisoners while making the most of this hopefully once in a lifetime experience reflecting that he’ll likely never have the opportunity to wear such worn out undergarments ever again. 

A quiet man already in middle age, Hanawa (Tsutomu Yamazaki) is no dangerous criminal merely a firearms enthusiast who liked to fire modified pistols into bottles of water. He’s got three years for illegal possession of weaponry and explosives, which seems to be quite a harsh penalty considering another man is doing seven for murder after shooting a man he says waved an axe at him when he went to collect a debt. There are clearly men who have committed violent crimes in Hanawa’s immediate vicinity, yet this is not a traditional tale of prison gangs and factional infighting, the only violence we witness concerns one prisoner who appears to have broken the rules accidentally in thoughtlessness or ignorance rather than direct rebellion. Rather it is, ironically enough, almost like a summer camp in which Hanawa and his four cellmates attempt to amuse themselves during the little free time they are offered for contemplation and relaxation. 

Even so, every inch of the prisoners’ lives is micromanaged by the guards from the way they walk to when they are allowed to move or speak. So entirely stripped of their dignity are they, that they must ask for permission even to use the toilet in their own cell while in solitary confinement and dutifully report back once they’ve finished. The communal squat toilets at the back of the workshop where Hanawa works crafting wooden tissue boxes are entirely open with only knee-height doors on each stall for privacy. The prisoners’ days are tightly ordered, early to bed and early to rise with work in-between and only the promise of rest to look forward to on weekends and holidays. 

Ostensibly a shy man, Hanawa dislikes having to ask permission all the time though not so much as an affront to his autonomy as simply bothersome. Surprisingly he begins to warm to the rhythms and routines of prison life discovering in them a kind of liberation, finding his time in solitary for “unauthorised communication” the most enjoyable of his sentence free as it is of the necessity of interacting with other people. Like the bug collector in Woman of the Dunes, he finds freedom in simplicity appreciating the mindlessness of his absurd new job folding paper bags for medical prescriptions. He can abandon any sense of responsibility for his life, submitting himself entirely to the guards’ authority and surrendering the need for control, happy to allow his existence to be managed for him without needing to decide on anything for himself. 

That aside, it’s difficult to see what other purpose prison could serve for a man like Hanawa who merely had an unusual if potentially dangerous hobby save providing him with a unique life experience he seems to be treating as a kind of adventure. He may at times look down on his cellmates who have their own routines, but otherwise appears grateful for their input and advice regarding prison life often listening to their explanations for behaviour he regards as strange such as removing one’s trousers before entering the bathroom and then deciding to do as they do. With so little stimulation the mundane becomes exciting, each meal a culinary adventure listening to a cellmate recount his group treat of a film screening (Takeshi Kitano’s Kid’s Return) as if he had returned from exotic land relishing his description of the chocolate biscuits and cola he was given to snack on. Time is what Hanawa is doing, but he does at least gain the opportunity of experiencing life in slow motion learning to appreciate the beauty of a single dandelion while observing the absurdity of the world all around him which is perhaps no more absurd than that which exists outside. 

Space Travelers (スペーストラベラーズ, Katsuyuki Motohiro, 2000)

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“What are you doing now?” asks a very zeitgeisty set of onscreen titles at the beginning of Katsuyuki Motohiro’s millennial heist comedy, Space Travelers (スペーストラベラーズ). Both hopeful and not, Motoyuki’s cosmic farce takes the sense of anxiety and despair which colour other similarly themed turn of the century movies and turns them into a source of possibility while simultaneously implying that for some paradise may always be out of reach or else relegated to a state of mind. After all, “reality is different from animation”.

The idea of a far off paradise is what drives a trio of orphans (Takeshi Kaneshiro, Masanobu Ando, and Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) to consider armed robbery, planning the slick kind of heist they’ve seen in the movies in which they run into off into the sunset with a bag full of cash after holding a bank to ransom. Of course, it doesn’t quite go to plan leaving the three essentially good-hearted guys with a problem because they weren’t really prepared to harm anyone (two of their three weapons are duds) and they don’t have a plan B. What happens then is somewhat unexpected as a degree of camaraderie begins to arise between the would-be-thieves and the small number of customers and employees trapped in the foyer who then become something of an artificial team trying to overcome the rapidly escalating situation as the police surround the building in the incorrect assumption that the robbery is connected to terrorist action. 

What soon becomes apparent is that for the trio the heist is part wish fulfilment fantasy and a last ditch attempt to catapult themselves out of a sense of impossible despair. As they are all orphans, they feel a deeper sense of disconnection from a society which has in itself abandoned them, partly as it turns out hoping to find their long-lost parents in a tropical island paradise known to them only from a faded postcard. For the customers and employees, the robbery is the most exciting thing to happen to them in their entire lives and the proximity to mortal danger soon forces them to wrestle with their personal dissatisfaction. Before the heist took place, bank clerk Midori (Eri Fukatsu) had been planning to attend a party to celebrate her engagement to another employee branded a sleazy creep by most of the other female members of staff with whom he had apparently tried it on on previous occasions. She had agreed to marry him despite her reservations because he had sworn to lay down his life for her if she were ever in danger only to spot him trying to escape on his own via the air conditioning ducts. Being caught up in this bizarre situation forces her to accept she had been leading a “conveyor belt life” out of fear, always picking the safe option rather than take a risk chasing personal happiness even picking a husband solely because he promised her protection. 

In the Japan of the 2000s, chasing personal happiness might have seemed like a fools errand trapped in a stagnant economy with no prospect of improvement and only increased risk if you fall from one particular rung on the ladder. Yet the conclusion Midori seems to come to is that the only way of rebelling against this sense of nihilistic frustration is to take the risk and look for the paradise that is waiting for her rather than settle for a disappointing status quo. She learns this partly through her connection with one of the bank robbers who casts each of the hostages as members of his favourite, now cancelled, anime “Space Travelers” created according to an onscreen interview to offer a sense of something tangible to an increasingly disconnected youth that would allow them to experience a full range of emotions (the animated sequences created for the film were later spun off into an OVA of their own). Through their accidental role playing, the hostages each discover the sides of themselves they’d been missing to claim their true identities, Midori learning that she can protect herself, nerdy clerk Shimizu (Masahiro Komoto) overcoming his crippling shyness, a middle-aged electrician flummoxed by modern technology proving that his skills aren’t obsolete, and a feuding couple on the brink of divorce reflecting that they actually do work well as a team. 

Even so, not everyone comes out of the situation with new hope for the future with the implication being that some gambles are simply too big or that for some paradise will always lie just out of reach even if Midori remains committed to seeking it out on her own whether she eventually finds it or not. Meanwhile, Motohiro takes potshots at the media reality of the day as a cynical boyband publicity stunt to announce their breakup tour to rake in more cash before announcing a comeback is derailed by the press tripping over themselves to get to the unfolding bank hostage crisis with the police also doing their bit to hog the media spotlight while mistakenly believing a suspicious-looking man who actually is a fugitive terrorist is responsible for the heist. With the world as messed up as it clearly is, the film seems to say, chasing paradise is the least risky thing of all. 

Trailers (no subtitles)

Actress (映画女優, Kon Ichikawa, 1987)

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actressKon Ichikawa was born in 1915, just four years later than the subject of his 1989 film Actress (映画女優, Eiga Joyu) which uses the pre-directorial career of one of Japanese cinema’s most respected actresses, Kinuyo Tanaka, to explore the development of Japanese cinema itself. Tanaka was born in poverty in 1909 and worked as a jobbing film actress before being “discovered” by Hiroshi Shimizu and becoming one of Shochiku’s most bankable stars. The script is co-written by Kaneto Shindo who was fairly close to the action as an assistant under Kenji Mizoguchi at Shochiku in the ‘40s before being drafted into the war. A commemorative exercise marking the tenth anniversary of Tanaka’s death from a brain tumour in 1977, Ichikawa’s film never quite escapes from the biopic straightjacket and only gives a superficial picture of its star but seems content to revel in the nostalgia of a, by then, forgotten golden age.

The film begins with the young Tanaka awaiting a visit from her mentor, Hiroshi Shimizu (Toru Watanabe), whom her family are keen to thank for bringing them all to Tokyo away from their life of hardship. Although everyone is very happy for Tanaka’s success, there is shadow hanging over the party in the form of missing oldest brother Ryosuke who went on the run to avoid the draft and has not been heard of since.

Shimizu gives Tanaka (Sayuri Yoshinaga) her first roles at Shochiku where she becomes a contract player but is put out when another director, Heinosuke Gosho (Kiichi Nakai), wants to give her a leading role. Overruled by studio bosses, Shimizu becomes increasingly jealous of Tanaka’s career – a situation which is further complicated by the couple’s growing romantic entanglement which sees them living together in an unofficial marriage allowing Tanaka to continue acting. However, Shimizu continues to meddle in Tanaka’s professional life whilst also continuing his hard drinking, womanising playboy lifestyle. The couple eventually divorce but reunite from time to time on the film set.

Vowing never to marry again, the rest of Tanaka’s life is dedicated to acting and sees her working with some of the best directors of the age including Ozu (Shigemitsu Ogi) and later Mizoguchi (Bunta Sugawara). It is Tanaka’s professional and personal relationship with Mizoguchi which occupies the second half of the film. Judging by the first experience on the now lost Woman of Osaka in 1940, you wouldn’t think the two would ever wish to work together again though they eventually completed fifteen films together over the next fifteen years.

Mizoguchi’s process is completely different from any other Tanaka had worked with. Rather than meeting to rehearse and discuss the work, Mizoguchi abruptly sends her a lifetime’s supply of books about bunraku and changes the script that she has painstakingly committed to memory with on set rewrites communicated via a large blackboard he expects the actors to read from. Exasperated, Tanaka finally asks him for actual direction but he coldly states that she’s the actress and her acting is not part of his job description. Mizoguchi and Tanaka are very different people but each driven and ambitious so their frequent locking of horns produces a fiercely creative collaboration in which each was able to find worth even if it was frequently difficult.

The film ends around the time of Life of Oharu which would mark the final time the pair would work together. In terms of the film’s narrative, this unspoken development is foreshadowed by the idea that the two artists are heading in different directions but in the real world the reasons are a little less clear. Tanaka became the second woman to direct a feature film with Love Letters in 1953 which was even featured at Cannes, but for reasons unknown Mizoguchi attempted to block her access to the Director’s Guild of Japan, effectively ending both their friendship and any professional relationship. Ironically enough, Actress seems to imply that Tanaka’s desire to direct may have been inspired by Mizoguchi and his all powerful on set status prompting her to wonder how he does it, and, perhaps how she could do it too.

Ichikawa weaves the history of Japan through its cinema into the narrative to recount the changing tastes of the eras as naturalism came in and out of fashion and Japanese films began to experience international as well as domestic acclaim. Skipping huge portions of time to focus on the two directors – Shimizu and Mizoguchi, Ichikawa avoids mentioning Tanaka’s post-war visit to America which had a profound impact on her later career, not only in what she learned there but also in the extremely hostile reception she received on returning home. The main takeaway from his depiction of Tanaka is a woman ahead of her time, independent and headstrong, willing to work hard to achieve the things she wanted to achieve even if flying in the face of social convention though it makes no particular judgement on her character other than in her success as an actress.

Taking on the conceit of being a film about film, Ichikawa’s sets are theatrical, creating a deliberately artificial, half unreal world. This also extends into the scriptwriting which is extremely talky and more like a stage play than film, offering pointed, long stretches of monologuing which are already far away from the more naturalistic approach of early talking cinema. Characters have improbable, exposition filled conversations in which they each tell each other things they already know for the audience’s benefit – an effect which enhances the overall theatricality, but does draw attention to itself and eventually becomes wearing. Ichikawa’s picture of Tanaka is one of steely determination and of a woman ahead of her time, but even if Actress proves less than enlightening regarding its subject it does help to shed some light on both classic Japanese cinema and that of the late 1980s.

Original trailer (traditional Chinese subs only)

Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から, Hideo Nakata, 2002)

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dark-water

Review of Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water first published by UK Anime Network.

For good or ill, the J-horror boom came to dominate Japanese cinema at the turn of the century and if anyone can be said to have been instrumental in ushering it in, director Hideo Nakata and novelist Koji Suzuki, whose landmark collaboration on The Ring has become symbolic of the entire genre, must be at the head of the list. Dark Water (仄暗い水の底から, Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara) finds the pair working together again on another supernaturally tinged, creepy psychological thriller. Neatly marrying the classic J-horror tropes of freaky children and dripping wet ghosts, Dark Water also embraces aspects of the uniquely Japanese “hahamono” or mother movie which prizes maternal sacrifice and suffering above all else.

Yoshimi (Hitomi Kuroki), a nervous middle aged woman, is in the middle of a messy divorce with her exceedingly smug salaryman husband. Despite having been less than present during the marriage, Yoshimi’s husband now wants full custody of the couple’s five year old daughter, Ikuko (Rio Kanno). In order to aid her case, Yoshimi quickly finds an apartment and starts looking for a job. All seems to be going well except for the mysterious dripping stain on the ceiling which the building manager doesn’t seem very interested in fixing. Before long, strange events begin unfolding including unexplained puddles, a mysterious red children’s shoulder bag which keeps reappearing after being thrown out, and brief sightings of a little girl in a yellow raincoat….

Nakata opens the film with what is in effect a flashback sequence as Yoshimi waits for her own mother to pick her up from primary school. It quickly becomes apparent that Yoshimi’s relationship with her birth mother was an imperfect one which later ended in neglect and abandonment. Yoshimi continues to have frequent flashbacks to her childhood and harbours and intense fear of inflicting the same kind of damage her mother inflicted on her onto her own daughter. Ikuko is also left waiting at school when Yoshimi is kept late at a job interview – something which is eventually used against her in the court case. Though Yoshimi’s aunt reassures her that she’s doing a much better job than her mother did for her, Yoshimi is filled with doubts as to her suitability as a mother which are only further compounded by her intense love for her daughter and fear of losing her.

On top of her maternal worries and residual abandonment issues, Yoshimi also has a history of mental distress which her ex-husband uses to discredit her. It’s open to debate exactly how much of what appears to be happening is actually happening and how much a manifestation of a possible nervous breakdown, but aside from the supernatural shenanigans there are also real world dangers to consider including the missing posters for a girl who was around Ikuko’s age when she disappeared two years previously. The primary school headmaster is convinced that the girl was abducted by a third party but it also transpires that Mitsuko, like Yoshimi and as Yoshimi fears for Ikuko, was abandoned by her mother.

When it comes right down to it, Dark Water lays the blame for its supernaturally tinged evil firmly at the feet of divorce and family breakdown. The supposedly progressive primary school in which the main aim is to allow children freedom of expression is quick to tell the already overwrought Yoshimi that the “strange behaviour” they’ve been witnessing in Ikuko is essentially all her fault because of the divorce and disruption to Ikuko’s home life. Similarly, the central supernatural threat is born of maternal neglect, a symptom of the selfish individualism of the mother who has chosen to leave her child behind. Yoshimi has been jettisoned by her controlling ex-husband and her only thought is to keep her daughter with her, yet she is being made to pay for a social prejudice against atypical families such as those resulting from a “selfish” decision to dissolve a marriage.

Dark Water cleverly recasts Yoshimi as an idealised mother willing to sacrifice all to protect her child. As the situation intensifies, Yoshimi begins to feel as if she’s becoming a toxic presence in her daughter’s life. Rather than risk the same fate befalling her own daughter as has befallen her, Yoshimi opts to make herself the last link in the chain of abuse, freeing her daughter from her own baggage. In contrast with both Yoshimi and Mitsuko, Ikuko will always know that her mother loved her and will always be with her even if protecting her from afar.

Nakata conjures up a supremely creepy atmosphere filled with everyday horrors. The run down apartment complex in which Yoshimi finds her (presumably very reasonably priced) apartment is an unsettling world of its own with its strangely moist, dripping walls, eccentric residents, and rapidly decaying exterior. One of the most effective and visually interesting entries in the J-horror genre, Dark Water perfectly mixes creepy, supernatural horror with psychological drama culminating in a final sequence which doesn’t stint on the scares but proves emotionally devastating in the process.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Abacus and Sword (武士の家計簿, Yoshimitsu Morita, 2010)

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•Žm‚̉ƌv•ë•The stories of samurai whose soul is placed not in the sword but in another tool are quickly becoming a genre all of their own. Coming from the same screen writer as A Tale of Samurai Cooking: A True Love Story, Abacus and Sword is a similarly structured tale of penny pinching samurai accountants and a pean to the undersung heroes of the admin department without whom everything would fall apart.

Abacus and Sword (武士の家計簿, Bushi no Kakeibo) could almost be titled “a story of my father” as it begins with a voice over by the youngest adult generation seen in the film, Nariyuki Inoyama, who is at the time of speaking a naval accountant in the new post restoration world. As good an account as he is (and he must be, given his position), he feels he pales in comparison to his father, Naoyuki, whose skills with the abacus were somewhat legendary even if his people skills were often not on the same level.

Dubbed an abacus fanatic by his colleagues, Naoyuki’s top maths abilities get him into trouble right away when he notices an extreme discrepancy in the accounts details for the imperial rice dole. Around this time there are riots from farmers who are being squeezed to deliver more grain to the authorities during a time of famine but not seeing enough returned to them as well as starving people petitioning for food in the streets, so when Naoyuki asks why around a third of the rice is disappearing from the accounts or listed as “reserved” his superiors start getting nervous. As a mini underling, Naoyuki is not in a position to stop his bosses from exploiting their authority in the most devious of ways – creating a food panic and then profiting on the side through black market trading, and is simply instructed to “ensure the final accounts balance”. Unwilling to falsify his precious calculations, Naoyuki finds himself facing the possibility of exile from the imperial centre but eventually finds his persistence rewarded when the scam is finally uncovered by a higher level.

Accountants are often not respected in this era of samurai warriors who place an almost religious faith in the power of the sword. Their pay is low, hours long and taxing, and they have little prospects of advancement. After hearing the story of Naoyuki’s career Nariyuki returns to the subject of himself a little more as the conflict between austere father and wayward son takes centre stage. Naoyuki is a pragmatic man, he sees their family debts are unsustainable and embarks of prolonged plan of austerity in which he forces the entire extended family to sell all their non essential possessions and live as cheaply as possible until the debts reach a more manageable level so they can at least keep the social position their larger family home affords them rather than being moved to something less prestigious. This is an unusual move in status driven samurai circles and proves embarrassing for the rest of the family such as in one episode where Naoyuki can’t afford to buy fish for his son’s coming of age ceremony so simply puts a painting of a fish at each place setting. Creative accounting at its finest!

Nariyuki, however, can’t quite give up on the idea of the sword and goes off to fight in the various civil wars which erupt during the Meiji Restoration causing great worry to his parents, wife and children. He too becomes an accountant and is at first disappointed that it’s his skills with an abacus that can best serve the country rather than those needed on the frontlines but later comes to understand the tactical importance of maintaining the smooth financial functioning of an army.

A late career effort from the prolific Yoshimitsu Morita, Abacus and Sword is an uneven experience which is more or less devoid of the director’s usual attempts at experimentation pushing for a more general, sometimes even televisual approach to storytelling. At heart the film praises the virtues of living a thrifty, honest, and balanced life in which hard work is always fairly rewarded in the end and even when not provides its own set of rewards. However, virtuous as it is to live honestly and simply in tune with the clack of an abacus, it can prove fairly dull which is unfortunately also true of Abacus and Sword which despite brief episodes of light humour never quite engages with its twin dynamics of father son conflict which echoes that of the changing world as it emerges into the new Meiji era, and of shining a light on the forgotten admin workers who keep the world turning when everything else is falling apart. Morita’s anti-consumerist, transparency in government sympathies come to the fore and are once again timely, but like Naoyuki he fails to make his complaints sufficiently engaging to ensure his messages are received by those with the ability to take action.

English subtitled trailer: