“What is your function in life?” It is, after all, quite a difficult question as an air stewardess (Tae Kimura) points out when interrogated by an irate British hitman (Vinnie Jones), and perhaps one that most people never really think about. Indeed, many of those questioned struggle with the meaning of “function”, replying with the most obvious answer of their occupation or job title without really considering any deeper implications or whether their existence is really meaningful. The hitman seems to have a secondary mission of eliminating those whom he deems “unnecessary”, while simultaneously giving his only sign of approval to a man who straightforwardly tells him that he doesn’t have one.
Gen Sekiguchi’s Survive Style 5+ is full of this kind of questioning but ultimately a tale of how one learns to survive in an often absurd world. Like many films from the mid-2000s, it cuts between several interwoven plot threads that at first seem nonsensical but finally coalesce into a complete whole. An artist (Tadanobu Asano) repeatedly kills his wife (Reika Hashimoto) who is forever trying to kill him in bizarre ways only for her to respawn back at their very weird Western-style country lodge in the woods. An ad executive (Kyoko Koizumi) becomes fed up with her vain hypnotist boyfriend (Hiroshi Abe) who mocks her career. A salaryman (Ittoku Kishibe) is hypnotised to think that he’s a chicken, and a trio of burglars (Kanji Tsuda, Yoshiyuki Morishita, Jai West) deal with repressed emotion and romantic longing.
They are all to some extent trying to find some way to survive along with a sense of purpose in their lives. Ad executive Yoko is forever coming up with zany ideas for TV adverts that she records on her dictaphone, sniggering to herself at their surreal humour though she is the only one who finds them funny and her work is often dismissed by her corporate clients who complain that her ads don’t do anything to inform the prospective customer about the nature of the product. Sekiguchi was himself also a director of TV adverts which informs the film’s short and snappy style, and Yoko’s artistic frustrations perhaps echo his own as she tries to fulfil herself creatively while meeting the client’s demands.
The CEO of the pharmaceuticals company she’s working with (Shinichi Chiba) is forever taking “emergency” calls from his wife about such important issues as the bulb having gone in the bathroom which he treats with the upmost seriousness while admitting that he really doesn’t know how to address any of these domestic issues. Similarly, the salaryman is prevented from living a full family life because of the demands of his job, but becomes a temporary hero after getting tickets to see the sold-out hypnotist. In someways, he might even be happier as a bird which after all offers more “freedom” if only he could learn to fly. While his wife and daughter are most interested in curing him so that he can become a stereotypical salaryman again and fulfil the roles of father and husband by providing for the family, only his son determines to accept his father’s new reality and love him for who he is now.
The family’s home is designed with an artificial quality giving it the appearance of the set for a TV sitcom, bearing out the ersatz nature of conventional family life in which everyone is forced to bear out their particular “function” without imbuing it with much meaning. When the burglars break in, they too inhabit this space as if they were children who’ve come over to play by sitting down and playing cards rather than looting the place, though it turns out the family don’t actually have very much worth stealing. While Tsuda is forever taking calls from a girlfriend, Morishita and J exchange a series of longing looks but are otherwise unable to express their feelings for each other due to lingering societal homophobia and emotional vulnerability. Only when challenged by the hitman are they able to express their feelings after questioning their own “function in life”.
Jones was clearly hired for his hardman image which he’d successfully brought off the football pitch and into a series of gangster movies in the late 90s, imbuing each of his lines with an absurd intensity which is equally matched by Yoshiyoshi Arawakawa’s comical attempts to echo his intimidating speech patterns as his interpreter though without the physical presence to pull it off. The hitman is quite clearly a harbinger of death, but at the same time it’s his existential probing that points the way towards survival as his various targets are forced to consider what their “function in life” really is and if they’re living in ways that are meaningful and fulfilling. The film’s anarchic production design and deadpan humour add to the sense of surreality as Sekiguchi gleefully ricochets between one storyline and another looking for new modes of survival in an increasingly absurd world.
Survive Style 5+ is currently screening in select UK cinemas and released on UHD/Bluray on 19th October courtesy of Third Window Films.
Trailer (dialogue free)
Every love story is a ghost story, as the aphorism made popular (though not perhaps coined) by David Foster Wallace goes. For The Tale of Nishio (ニシノユキヒコの恋と冒険, Nishino Yukihiko no Koi to Boken), adapted from the novel by Hiromi Kawakami, this is a literal truth as the hero dies not long after the film begins and then returns to visit an old lover, only to find her gone, having ghosted her own family including a now teenage daughter. The Japanese title, which is identical to Kawakami’s novel, means something more like Yukihiko Nishino’s Adventures in Love which might give more of an indication into his repeated failures to find the “normal” family life he apparently sought, but then his life is a kind of cautionary tale offered up as a fable. What looks like kindness sometimes isn’t, and things done for others can in fact be for the most selfish of reasons.
Koki Mitani is one of the most bankable mainstream directors in Japan though his work has rarely travelled outside of his native land. Beginning his career in the theatre, Mitani is the master of modern comedic farce and has the rare talent of being able to ground often absurd scenarios in the humour that is very much a part of everyday life. Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (ラヂオの時間, Radio no Jikan) is Mitani’s debut feature in the director’s chair though he previously adapted his own stage plays as screenplays for other directors. This time he sets his scene in the high pressure environment of the production booth of a live radio drama broadcast as the debut script of a shy competition winner is about to get torn to bits by egotistical actors and marred by technical hitches.
Times change, and men must change with them or they must die. When Japan was forced to open up to the rest of the world after centuries of isolation, its ancient order of samurai with their feudal lords and subjugated peasantry was abandoned in favour of a more Western looking democratic solution to social stratification. Suddenly the entirety of a man’s life was rendered nil – no more lords to serve, a man must his make his own way now. However, for some, old wounds continue to fester, making it impossible for them to embrace this entirely new way of thinking.
