Tag: Shinsuke Minami

To Trap a Kidnapper (誘拐報道, Shunya Ito, 1982)

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One of a number of films released in the early ’80s critical of the police force, To Trap a Kidnapper (誘拐報道, Yukai Hodo) draws inspiration from a real life case of child abduction but suggests that the police largely just get in the way and are only interested in apprehending the culprit rather than ensuring the boy’s safety. In any case, unlike the similarly themed High and Low, the film devotes most of its focus to the kidnapper’s desperation as a man apparently left behind by the rapidly rising tides of prosperity. 

Yet somewhat perversely the film opens with a scene of children playing and seven-year-old Hideyuki (Motoyoshi Wada) getting into trouble for flicking toy discs at his friend and deskmate Kaori (Kaori Takahashi). Hideyuki is then made to stand on his own in the playground as a punishment, though quickly makes things up to Kaori by gifting her the plastic discs he was playing with. Neither of them know it, but the children share a grim connection for it’s Kaori’s father Kazuo (Kenichi Hagiwara) who is responsible for kidnapping Hideyuki on his way home from school in the next town over.

Both Hideyuki and Kaori attend a prestigious private institution but are being raised in very different circumstances. Kazuo was once a successful cafe owner but was swindled out of his business and is now in massive debt to a shady loanshark named Moriyasu who’s sold his promissory note on to a third party debt collector. Hideyuki’s father, Noboru Mitamura (Fujita Okamoto), is a doctor though there’s nothing that suggests the family is anything more than financially comfortable and they aren’t immediately able to get the money together for the ransom. Noboru has to ring round all his friends, family, and random acquaintances begging for emergency loans but without really being able to explain why he needs the money. Just having seen it noted on a school register that Hideyuki’s dad was medical professional Kazuo assumed they’d be a good target for a kidnapping and is in any case resentful of their nice middle class life. 

His wife, Yoshie (Rumiko Koyanagi), is in turn resentful of Kazuo for their reduced circumstances later lamenting that they moved house, swapped their big car for a smaller one and are even going to rehome their dog but if Kazuo is really so deeply in debt, something he had kept from her, then nothing they do really matters because their lives will never improve. What she can’t understand is why Kazuo was so keen on keeping Kaori in a private school that he’d get himself into financial hell rather than make a more pragmatic decision to let her go somewhere else. The obsession perhaps hints at his class anxiety, wanting his daughter to stay in a more resolutely middle class environment otherwise in strong contrast to the hometown he later visits where his elderly mother operates a loom in a moribund fishing village which the youngsters are slowly leaving for jobs in factories in neighbouring towns. 

Perhaps in over his head, it at one point looks like Kazuo is about to dump Hideyuki’s body in the sea only to realise police divers are already searching the area. Despite himself, he begins to care for the boy though doesn’t really know what to do with him. He feeds him bread from convenience stores and keeps him tied up in the boot of his car wrapped in several blankets without really considering the possibility that he may die of cold or hypothermia left outside in the freezing winter. Realising the distraught parents have called in the police despite his warnings not to, he is too afraid to accept the ransom and is therefore at something of an impasse given he can’t very well give up the boy without getting the money.

Meanwhile, as the Japanese title implies the tale is alternately told from the perspective of the reporters at Yomiuri Shinbun who are originally quite annoyed by the police’s request for a news blackout to avoid panicking the kidnapper, suggesting it’s an infringement on their free speech if coming around in the acceptance that a child’s life is at stake. A rookie reporter, Kotaro (Shin Takuma) is involved in a dispute with his fiancée Tomo (Miwako Fujitani) who is having second thoughts because he’s always working while her parents are pressuring her to consider an arranged marriage. Kotaro refuses to write one of the dummy articles they’re putting together in the event that Hideyuki is killed describing it as morbid and irresponsible, but is very involved with the ongoing press investigation which simultaneously seems more rigorous than that of the police and accidentally gets in its way. A “suspicious car” that’s noticed outside a drop sport turns out to belong not to the kidnapper but a reporter on a stakeout wasting the police’s time.

Even they are eventually conflicted, the officer in charge on the ground later letting the Mitamuras leave on their own for the final drop empathising with them as a fellow parent and acknowledging the reason everything keeps going wrong is because the police got involved. Yet his boss orders him to follow them anyway, reminding him that the only job of the police is to catch the culprit seemingly indifferent to whether or not they rescue the hostage unharmed. Their tactics are quite naive, not considering that Kazuo will obviously realise that the Mitamuras are surrounded by undercover officers because they keep using the same ones and it’s odd to keep seeing that couple from the coffee shop everywhere they go. The big break in the case happens by accident just because a couple of traffic cops decide to ask a random car a few questions.

In any case, it’s Kaori who ends up suffering. She and her mother are also victims, unfairly hounded by the press and left with nowhere to go and no-one to turn to having had their lives turned upside down by her father’s desperate decision. He didn’t even know the kids were friends or the effect his actions would have on his daughter. Kazuo hadn’t really thought any of this through but acted only in jealousy and resentment, wanting payback against the Mitamuras for their nice middle class life and his own slice of the pie that he felt had been denied to him. In the end, the only winners are the press who can rejoice in selling their newspapers even if a remorseful Kotaro resents himself for taking a paparazzo photo of Yoshie and Kaori trying to leave town quietly. On seeing his article pasted on pillars at the station, even Tomo starts to change her mind reflecting that if he’s working on a story like this then perhaps working too much isn’t such a dealbreaker after all even if everyone seems to have forgotten about little Hideyuki in the headlong rush to dominate the newsstands by trying to lure a kidnapper into their trap.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Dodes’ka-den (どですかでん, Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

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By the late 1960s, Akira Kurosawa was in the midst of a creative crisis having spent two years working on the Japanese segments of the Hollywood war film Tora! Tora! Tora before he was eventually let go by the parsimonious US producers who feared he was spending too much money and making too little progress. Meanwhile, the studio system which had supported his career was collapsing and could no longer offer the kinds of budgets necessary for his personal brand of epic cinema. Teaming up with Masaki Kobayashi, Kon Ichikawa, and Keisuke Kinoshita, he formed the Club of the Four Knights production company but the first and only film they produced, Dodes’kaden (どですかでん), was not perhaps the kind of film many were expecting.

Inspired by a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto, the film like The Lower Depths focuses on a small community living in a slum only in this case on the edge of the modern city. Shot in classical 4:3, it was also Kurosawa’s first foray into colour and makes the most of his painterly eye with its surrealist backdrops and exaggerated sunsets. Once again there is the feeling that these people are already dead or trapped in a kind of purgatory unable to escape their desperate suffering, the slum as much of a mindset as a physical place. “Life is nothing but pain to me” one man claims, stating his hope that he die as quickly as possible while relating the sad story of his life: falling into depression when his sons were killed in the war and losing his wife, business, and finally home to the Tokyo air raids. Yet he is reminded that his family live on in him as long as he does and to kill himself is to kill them too, rediscovering a desire to survive even in his suffering. 

Another man, Hei (Hiroshi Akutagawa), dresses in a soldier’s uniform and wanders around like a zombie with, as one person puts it, the eyes of a dead man. Later a woman comes to find him, but he is seemingly unable to reawaken himself and move on from his trauma, now numbed to life, an already spent force. A young woman, Katsuko (Tomoko Yamazaki), is little different. Never speaking she has been raised by her uncle who begins sexually abusing her while her aunt is in hospital. She says that she wants to die, stabbing the only boy who showed her kindness because she feared he’d forget her. 

These people have largely been forgotten, living almost in another era and entirely cut off from mainstream society in a kind of etherial purgatory. Like the residents of The Lower Depths, a degree of fantasy is necessary for their survival a case in point being that of a beggar and his son who live an abandoned car and fantasise about the kind of house they’d build, a vast modernist building in white with a swimming pool. Like Katsuko, the boy is let down by his father who remains the car and sends him out to beg for food, telling him off when he lights a fire to boil fish as the man at the sushi shop had told him to do insisting, with disastrous results, that as it’s pickled it doesn’t need to be cooked. The furthest out of the residents, the pair have an almost grotesque appearance, their faces tinged with a morbid green. 

But then the couples living at the centre seemed to have found an antidote to despair in a surreal process of wife swapping now unable to remember whose husband is whose despite being neatly colour coded in matching outfits. A man with a nervous tic defends his grumpy yet fiercely loyal wife, and another man raises several children who may not be biologically his but are loved all the same. The old man who acts as a kind of confidant giving out advice and settling disputes through benevolent trickery has evidently learned how to live in this world and gets by as best he can while the son of the melancholy woman who runs the tempura stall drives an imaginary train through the slum the rhythm of which gives the film its name in its slow and certain progress towards nowhere at all. Heartbreakingly there are moments where the young man can hear the train in the distance, but it remains forever out of reach. Dodes’kaden didn’t do very well at the box office or with critics, its lack of success of cited as a factor in Kurosawa’s attempt to take his own life the following year, yet had perhaps set him on a new artistic course of colour and light which would define the further direction of his later career.

Dodes’ka-den screens at the BFI Southbank, London on 15th & 16th January 2023 as part of the Kurosawa season.