Convinced he’s dying of a terminal illness, a young nightclub singer yearns for death in Yoji Yamada’s romantic farce, Let’s Have a Dream (九ちゃんのでっかい夢, Kyu-chan no Dekkai Yume). In fact, the Japanese title is “Kyu’s Big Dream,” directly putting the name of the star into the name of the picture though he does in fact play a character called “Kyutaro” whose music career is starting to take off just as he convinces himself that his life is hopeless. Best known for “Ue o Muite Aruko”, Kyu Sakamoto was a huge singing star throughout the 1960s until his death in a plane crash at the very young age of 43.
Based on a novel by Nobuhiko Kobayashi who was working with Sakamoto on a television show at the time (and asked for a pseudonym because he wasn’t sure how the movie would turn out), the film is however partly an exploration of the nation’s growing internationalism. Indeed, the film opens with the Pan Am logo and then immediately travels to Switzerland where an elderly lady is dying having apparently never married or had children but still attached to the memory of her first love, a man from Japan. Accordingly, she decides to leave her entire fortune to that man’s grandson, Kyutaro (Kyu Sakamoto), which comes as a total shock to her closest living relative, “The wicked Mr Edward Allan Poe.” Her butler then vows to travel to Japan to tell Kyutaro the good news, but ends up sitting next to the hit man Edward Allan Poe hires on the plane.
But Kyu has already hired a hitman to take himself out because he thinks he’s suffering from a terminal disease and feels nothing other than fear and hopelessness. Though all he wants to do is die, he is unable to take his own life and so has decided this is the best way. He’s also in love with a childhood friend who works in a diner at the docks, but unbeknownst to him Ai (Chieko Baisho) has just got engaged to their other friend Kiyohiko (Muga Takewaki), a sailor. To add to the sense of European romanticism, Kyu writes long notes to himself about his sadness and melancholy all while the countess’ right-hand man continues to refer to him as the luckiest man in the world.
In a running gag, the hitman speaks mainly in French and the Countess’ butler in cod German hinting at a new kind of internationalism. The hitman Kyu hires through shady local guy Pon (Kanichi Tani) is, however, much less sophisticated. He can’t afford a gun and fails to kill Kyu several times in other ways usually injuring himself in the attempt which again makes Japan look somewhat inferior to the rest of the world just as the opulent vistas of the Countess’ castle contrast so strongely with the down and dirty nature of the docks where Kyu lives and works.
Despite being so desperate to die, Kyu pulls away when the hitman he hired tries to kill him which along with his inability to take his own life may suggest that he really does want to live after all. Though she evidently does not return his romantic feelings, Ai clearly cares for him deeply describing Kyu as like oxygen for her while trying to get to the bottom of what’s with wrong with him but it takes Kyu a little longer to figure out that people care about him even if not quite in the way he was hoping they would. Even so, there’s no denying the farcical quality of all that’s befallen him as he finds himself “the luckiest man in the world,” caught between two hitmen, and staving off eventual romantic heartbreak.
Still, even this plays into the melancholy sense of romanticism and elliptical ending as Kyu eventually gets to fulfil one of his big dreams by going to Europe and getting to live the life of a heartbroken count from a 19th century romantic novel. As a vehicle for Sakamoto, the film also features several of his songs along with dance routines and some otherwise goofy clowning while Chieko Baisho also performs a short but sweet rendition of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. It’s all undoubtedly very silly but somehow heartfelt and wholesome for all its buried melancholy and deeply felt romanticism.
Original trailer (no subtitles)
“If you don’t laugh when you see this movie, I’m going to execute you” abacus wielding hitman Komatsu warns us at the beginning of Haryasu Noguchi’s Murder Unincorporated (大日本殺し屋伝, Dai Nihon Koroshiya-den). Luckily for us, it’s unlikely he’ll be forced to perform any “calculations”, and the only risk we currently run is that of accidentally laughing ourselves to death as we witness the absurd slapstick adventures of Japan’s craziest hitman convention when the nation’s “best” (for best read “most unusual”) contract killers descend on a small town looking for “Joe of Spades” – a mysterious assassin known only by the mole on the sole of his foot.
Windows on Worlds 