Tag: So Hirosawa

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 Muse Never Drowns (ミューズは溺れない, Nozomi Asao, 2022)

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A teenage girl flounders amid a series of changes in her life while questioning her future and identity in Nozomi Asao’s empathetic coming-of-age film, A Muse Never Drowns (ミューズは溺れない, Muse wa Oborenai). Saku (Miku Uehara) is however drowning, a fact brought home to her by the relentlessly aloof Saibara (Mimori Wakasugi) who captures a sense of her panic and despair in a painting of her falling into the local harbour. Yet through their rather tumultuous friendship the pair eventually discover that they aren’t so different after all.

Saibara’s perfectly executed painting destabilises Saku on more than only level, firstly in her discomfort in having been seen and secondly in the insecurity it causes her in her own talent as an artist. Saku had wanted to go to art college, but a teacher harshly corrects her drawing style as if trying to push her towards a more authentic form of expression that’s less worried about getting it right than capturing a sense of what she sees and feels. Lacking confidence that she’ll get in, Saku is thinking about quitting the club in embarrassment but is persuaded to try making something else for the cultural festival while simultaneously receiving an unexpected entreaty from Saibara who wants her to pose for her next painting.

Most of the other students seem to resent Saibara for what they see as her superiority complex, believing she is aloof because she thinks she’s better than them. Because of her blunt manner, Saku too had thought her to be ultra confident and is surprised to realise that Saibara too is filled with doubts and anxieties even if she makes a point of pushing through them. Echoing her teacher’s words, Saibara admits that the lines don’t always come out the way she wants them either but all she can do is try to connect the dots. The reason for her aloofness is a vicious circle of deep-seated loneliness that convinces her she will ultimately be rejected, mirroring Saku’s conviction that she is a “boring” person, and therefore it is easier to remain alone from the start. 

Part of Saibara’s self-rejection is borne of internalised homophobia uncertain if others will accept her sexuality while harbouring a crush on Saku she doesn’t know how to articulate other than through her art while Saku too struggles with her feelings and is confused by the attention she receives from Saibara. Saku’s feelings of insecurity are informed by a sense of embarrassment that she has never experienced a romantic crush like her friend Emi (Kokoro Morita) who likes baseball player Endo despite knowing that likes he Saku, though Emi has also picked up on the way she looks at Saibara and is drawing conclusions about her lack interest in boys. Emi tells her that she accepts her whatever her sexuality is, but is hurt and confused when Saku remains silent and declines the opportunity to open up to her though perhaps partly because she does not really know the answer herself. 

Other than Saibara, Saku is the only one who hasn’t yet returned her careers survey still uncertain of the future direction of her life. Her father has recently remarried and he and her step mother Satomi (So Hirosawa) are expecting a baby all of which has Saku feeling somewhat adrift, displaced within her family and soon to lose her home which has been bought out for a new development project meaning they’ll soon be moving to a new house shorn of the memories of her birth mother and primed for her father’s new start. 

Yet through all her experiences, slowly bonding with Saibara and repairing her friendship with Emi, Saku begins to discover a path towards a more authentic art born of the desire to take things apart and put them back together again while quite literally feeling her way forward with her hands. Coming to terms with her new family circumstances, she builds herself a boat and is no longer drowning but drawing strength from her new found friendships with a renowned sense of possibility for the future while her friends do much the same in the knowledge that they are all scared and uncertain but doing their best to join the dots towards a happier future. 

Trailer (English subtitles)

What’s For Dinner, Mom? (ママ、ごはんまだ？, Mitsuhito Shiraha, 2016)

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What's for Dinner Mom posterJapanese cinema has a preoccupation with mothers and the nature of motherhood, but the mothers of the typical “hahamono” tend to be either saintly, self sacrificing figures whose selfless love often goes unrecognised, or problematic matriarchs whose fierce love and desire to protect their children has caused them to transgress and perhaps lose their children’s love. The mother at the centre of What’s For Dinner, Mom? (ママ、ごはんまだ？, Mama, Gohan Mada?) falls into a more realistic category – loving, self sacrificing, imperfect and perhaps sometimes misunderstood but always doing the best for her two daughters even in difficult circumstances. Where What’s For Dinner, Mom? differs from the accepted pattern is in its use of the domestic world to ask questions about culture and identity, and about all the various ways one never quite knows one’s family.

Tae (Haruka Kinami) and Yo (Izumi Fujimoto), sisters and now middle-aged women, are preparing to clear their family home 20 years after the death of their mother (Michiko Kawai). What’s taken them so long to make the decision is never revealed but both are as happy as possible about the idea and it seems Tae and her husband plan to knock the house down and build their own on the same plot – not quite so radical a thing as it might sound, Japan has no real housing market and “modern” houses are often knocked down and rebuilt every 20 to 30 years. Whilst packing things away, Tae finds a small box full of her mother’s keepsakes – chiefly letters and photographs along with a handwritten recipe book she began keeping in 1972.

Though Tae has lived in Japan for all her adult life, she was born in Taiwan and is half Taiwanese. Tae’s father passed away from lung cancer when she was small, but was a depressed, sometimes difficult man with ambivalent feelings towards his home nation. His own family had come from the mainland, but he’d lived in Taiwan under Japanese rule and attended university in Japan. He felt himself to be Japanese and was constantly upset and angry about the turbulent political situation of the post-war nation, facing its own series of identity crises and a protracted period of oppressive martial law.

Nevertheless, after their unpredictable whirlwind romance, Tae’s mother Kazue moved to Taiwan to live with her husband’s family and became determined to adapt to the local culture – chiefly through food. After her husband died in Japan, Kazue kept Taiwan alive for her daughters through continuing to cook the dishes she’d learned from her friends and family in Taiwan (even though her intensely “Japanese” husband only ever wanted to eat yudofu). Though Tae at one point urged to her mother to stop cooking Taiwanese and give her stereotypically cute high school bento, she quickly realised her mistake and Kazue’s unusual Taiwanese cooking became a local hit (even boosting the availability of the previously unobtainable pig’s trotters).

Despite her love of the food, Tae has all but forgotten her Taiwanese roots since her mother’s death and doesn’t know how to cook any of the dishes herself. Tae’s mild identity crisis comes to the fore in the second half of the film, though it’s an oddly under developed plot strand given the centrality of the cuisine. When she eventually makes the decision to visit her father’s remaining family, Tae seems to understand Taiwanese Mandarin but usually replies in Japanese (her uncle, accompanying her, is fluent). Like Kazue’s diary, Tae’s reminiscences are accompanied by on screen intertitles written in Chinese characters drawn childishly (even the characters which are identical to those used in Japanese are somewhat awkwardly rendered), which points to a kind of duality but is never really resolved even if Tae is able to explain a strange childhood memory and bring a piece of her past home with her.

Through her food odyssey and return to source, Tae is able to appreciate her mother’s love and sacrifice from an adult perspective, no longer left with teenage resentment and unfair anger over her early death but reclaiming her happy memories and appreciating the hardship her mother must have faced as a single mother in pre-bubble Japan. Despite its warm and fuzzy tone, What’s For Dinner, Mom? occasionally seems as if it wants to do something bigger by briefly introducing larger themes – Tae’s father’s depression, illness, the difficult political situation of post-war Taiwan, and the complex interplay between the two nations, but is content to settle back into a comforting “hahamono” tale of selfless motherhood finally appreciated only when it’s too late. Nevertheless it does what it set out to do in telling the story of a warm and loving family anchored by a kind yet determined woman and tables full of wholesome home cooking offered with an open, internationalist, heart.

Original trailer (English subtitles)