Tag: Third Window Films

Angel Guts: Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Takashi Ishii, 1994)

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Sent to cover a pornographic movie shoot, a young woman finds herself confronted by the teenage trauma that continues to haunt her in the final instalment in the Angel Guts series, Red Flash (天使のはらわた 赤い閃光, Tenshi no harawata: Akai senko). Adapting his own manga, Ishii draws on giallo and classic noir as the heroine attempts to reclaim herself from the spectres that are haunting her even as Japan itself seems to be a land of predatory and dangerous men.

Nevertheless, as the film begins, Nami (Maiko Kawakami) seems to be holding her own aside from an apparent problem with alcohol that sees her drink far to much and end up in vulnerable, potentially dangerous situations. She has a job as an editor and ad hoc photographer where she’s regularly subjected to extreme imagery, while her sleazy boss is also sexually harassing her and in fact attempts to force himself on her in the lift. It’s being sent to take photos at a porno shoot featuring intense rape scenes that awakens her buried teenage trauma of having been abducted and raped on her way home from school.

Nami is haunted by the spectre of her attacker, though as her new ally Muraki (Jinpachi Nezu) tells her it’s only by killing this ghost that she might be able to “erase” the harmful memories of her rape and overcome the repulsion she feels towards sex with men. Perhaps problematically, the film then phrases Nami’s journey as one of repair in which the ultimate goal is being able to enjoy heterosexual sex which seems to be something Nami herself desires to the extent her inability to do so leaves her feeling as if there’s something wrong with her. Even so, it seems she is able to have successful and enthusiastic sex with bar owner Chihiro (Noriko Hayami) who seduces, or perhaps takes advantage of, Nami after bringing her home because she’d had too much to drink at the bar.

On another drunken occasion, Nami is ushered into a love hotel where she wakes up naked several hours later with no recollection of how she got there. Looking around, she spots not only a bloody knife in the sink, but the body of a middle-aged man hidden under the duvet, and camera which has apparently been filming the whole thing. The act of watching her assault, of which she has no memory, echoes the out of body experience of her rape in which she sees another version of herself save her by killing the attacker. What Nami is essentially trying to do is kill the attacker in her mind through discovering what really happened in the hotel room. As Nami has developed a fear of sex of men, she has a tendency to kick and punch violently in self-defence which, coupled with her drunkeness, lead her to fear that she killed this man after waking up during the assault. In another kind of haunting, Nami begins receiving unpleasant phone calls from someone using a voice disguiser who knows she was at the hotel and attempts to blackmail her in exchange for sexual favours. 

Her first suspect is Muraki, which makes sense because he was at the bar and saw her leave with the other customer so could easily have followed her and either observed her entering the hotel and put two and two together after seeing the crime on the news, or actually committed the murder himself while she was unconscious. She’s also been given a negative impression of Muraki by her jealous boss who tells her that his wife killed herself because his constant infidelities. But Muraki is also carrying traumas of his own in his guilt over his wife’s death which he acknowledges was influenced by his behaviour even if because of a misunderstanding or irrational jealousy rather than sexual or emotional betrayal. Thus, Nami becomes to him a means of atonement in the form of a woman he could save in place of the wife he could not.

Which is to say, Nami is pulled towards trusting the improbable presence of a “good” man even as Chihiro insists that they don’t exist. After they made love, Chihiro deepened the intimacy between them by revealing that she had been abused by her stepfather, though it does not prompt Nami to reveal her own traumatic memories of her rape and abduction. She is reluctant to go to the police not because she fears she is guilty of the crime and wants to avoid punishment, but feels ashamed and can’t bear the idea of the police watching the tape which would amount to a kind of second rape. She does eventually allow Muraki to watch it, but on realising that it may exonerate her is still reluctant to let the police see it while torn by her civic duty in knowing that she has evidence that may help catch the “real” killer. She and Chihiro wonder why it is men like to watch the rape videos she was sent photograph, but can’t come up with much of an answer though it hints and an ingrained misogyny, a desire for control and dominance of a woman and her sexuality. The fact that she was sent to photograph it all by this otherwise mainstream company again hints at a kind of desensitisation amid an overly sexualised atmosphere even as her boss tells her the UN has been critical of Japanese attitudes to sex. Nevertheless it seems that Nami is able to overcome her trauma, to an extent, through reclaiming her identity even if she still has the occasional red flashes of violent fantasy.

Angel Guts: Red Flash is available as part of Third Window Films’ Takashi Ishii: 4 Tales of Nami boxset.

Vital (ヴィタール, Shinya Tsukamoto, 2004)

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“There is the vast realm of the unconscious,” one of the professors explains to vacant medical student Hiroshi a soon-to-be physician attempting to heal himself from a trauma he doesn’t fully understand. Perhaps as the title implies, Vital (ヴィタール) sees Tsukamoto branch out from his vistas of urban alienation to find a new paradise in nature albeit one that it exists largely in the mind and that the hero can never fully return to because this place of life is also one of death which exists inside a kind of eternity.

This explains to some extent Hiroshi’s (Tadanobu Asano) temporal confusion. Having lost his memory following a car accident in which he later learns his girlfriend Ryoko (Nami Tsukamoto) was killed, he shifts between “reality” and what first seems to be flashbacks of his unremembered past but are actually taking place in a kind of alternate, perhaps idealised reality in the “vast realm of the unconscious” as Hiroshi attempts to reconstruct his image of Ryoko along with that of himself. Another of his professors more philosophically asks were lies the seat of the soul in the human body and is this something that Hiroshi maybe unconsciously looking for during his anatomy classes in which he is coincidentally assigned Ryoko’s body to work on only realising when he sees her tattoo in one of his visions. 

In some ways this grim task of dissection is a bid for greater intimacy, to take Ryoko apart and then put her back together as the students diligently do at the end their studies reassembling the bodies and placing them in coffins in keeping with culturally specific death rituals. The faces of the cadavers are covered with a bag until the students are instructed to remove them, but they are always reminded to treat the dead with dignity and that their role here is one of understanding as they attempt to work out not only how these people died but also how they may have lived. Hiroshi causes conflict with some of his fellow students on just this point, seeming rather creepy in his vacant intensity over the body while also wanting to take ownership over that of Ryoko rather than work as part of the group complaining that the others are too clumsy and it’s affecting his ability to learn. 

Ryoko’s father comes to say that though he once blamed Hiroshi, his daughter had been in a way dead for a long time before she died, the light apparently going out of her eyes when she was still in high school. Only in Hiroshi’s unconscious does she say that she didn’t want to die despite an apparent obsession with death in Hiroshi’s other resurfacing memories/visions of her as symbolised in her repeated requests for him to strange her during in sex. Another of the professors had said that the suppressed desires of the unconscious could create conflict and this alternate reality is also in some senses Hiroshi’s own latent desire for death, to be with Ryoko in this new paradise that is founded on an idyllic beach rich with nature and sunshine where they are free to be together liberated from the oppressions of civilisation. 

Indeed, it’s been raining all through the film as if in expression of Hiroshi’s gloomy mental state but we later learn that Ryoko’s most treasured memory was simply standing in the rain with him and breathing in its scent. Verdant nature is aligned with the vitality that is often absent from the soulless concrete of a city in which everyone seems to exist in tiny, separate worlds which only border on but never join each other. Ikumi (Kiki), a strange female student who develops a fascination with Hiroshi, has an illicit conversation with a professor she’s apparently been sleeping with each of them speaking into mobile phones while standing steps apart. Tsukamoto often isolates the protagonists, placing them in corners or blurring the periphery as if they alone existed in this moment. In Hiroshi’s idealised alternate reality, these barriers disappear as he and Ryoko share an entire world in love and freedom. 

The irony is that he resurrects himself through the process of dissecting Ryoko’s dead body. His Da Vinci-like sketches begin to shift as do the ink-like shadows on the wall amid the reflection of the rain as Hiroshi stares vacantly trying to reassemble his past. Through accepting Ryoko’s death, he rediscovers life and is in a sense reborn insisting he will continue medicine even though his professor and parents advise him not to given what he’s just been through though his parents had also said that before the accident they didn’t really think he had it in him to become a doctor. Their disapproval may explain some of the pressures he was experiencing as perhaps was Ryoko that may have urged them to long for death. In any case, what the film presents is the archaeology of grief, a prolonged period of introspection and loneliness and a seeking of intimacy no longer really possible but discovered only in the vast realms of the unconscious.

Vital is released on UK blu-ray 30th September courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Door II: Tokyo Diary (Banmei Takahashi, 1991)

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A sequel in name only, Banmei Takahashi’s Door II: Tokyo Diary has almost nothing to do with his previous film Door, the title was apparently tacked on at the behest of studio execs who noticed that it had sold well on home video. Nevertheless, the film has its own door motif as the aimless heroine searches for herself among the many available to her, temporarily trying on other personas while wilfully flirting with danger. 

A menacing voice message reminds Ai (Chikako Aoyama) that her work is dangerous, a woman telling her to back off but for unclear reasons either genuinely concerned for her safety or annoyed she’s infringing on her business. Ironically enough, Ai is a call girl who runs her own operation through the soon-to-be obsolete technology of a telephone answering service which unlike the phones in Door offer her a one way portal of communication that isolates her from her potential clients. She explains that she chooses the men for herself, watching idly having quadruple booked the same appointment until finally deciding which door to open though it seems unclear how far she is aware of her vulnerability given that working alone means there’s no one to call if something goes wrong as it eventually does. Even the first client we see her with changes the moment he steps over the threshold, becoming angry having realised that Ai doubled booked the appointment while playing rough with her and forcing her down onto the bed. 

Ai (whose name means love) seems to treat each of the doors as another world in which she must play her assigned role. As such, she submits herself to every degradation though it’s unclear if the act of submission is empowering or she is really just at the mercy of these wealthy mean who’ve paid to do what they like with her. Then again as Ai explains to sometime love interest Ichiro (Shingo Kazami), her real motive is sex and not money leading her to turn down an appointment with a sweet older gentleman who’s checking call girl experience off his bucket list but does not actually want to sleep with her only go on a date. Meanwhile, she finds herself bound and blindfolded while a man in heavy makeup and a nazi uniform dribbles wine down her face as part of a urination role-play. She later plays the piano for him while he curls up in a little ball at her side. 

Becoming involved with a mysteriously wealthy art dealer (Joe Yamanaka) who treats her with unusual tenderness seems to shift Ai’s world view, but equally does an incredibly dark encounter with a dangerous man who attacks Ai and her friend Tomoyo (Yukino Tobita) with a pair of scissors until Tomoyo bites one of his toes off so they can escape. This is the danger the middle-aged madam (Keiko Takahashi) tried to warn her about and causes her to reconsider her life as a call girl until she finally decides to try the same door again and bursts the fantasy bubble by telling the art dealer she loves him. 

A climatic and hugely inappropriate speech at a wedding which nevertheless earns the appreciation of the bride, allows Ai to begin to rediscover herself realising that it was the sense of anticipation that she craved not knowing what she’d discover beyond each and every door. She decides she’d like to swim in the great ocean of infinite possibility once again, ready to open more doors to find out what lies beyond possibly reassured by the art dealer’s assertion that though most of his paintings are fakes he’s discovered a handful of “originals” too restoring Ai’s sense of self as an individual rather than an anonymous call girl who comes when called and has no direction of her own. A melancholy tale of youthful anxiety in the fracturing economy of the Bubble on the eve of its implosion the film trades on Takahashi’s experience in pink film in its at times perverse eroticism but ultimately presents a tale of a young woman regaining control over her self and her life, willing to embrace new possibilities and their concurrent dangers so long as she chooses them for herself. 

Door II: Tokyo Diary is released in the UK on blu-ray 30th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

Door (Banmei Takahashi, 1988)

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You like to think you’re safe behind closed doors, that nothing that happens behind them is anybody’s business and you’re free to be yourself. But a door is as much about keeping things in as it is about keeping them out and perhaps you’re not as in control of it as you thought. Arriving at the tail end of the Bubble era, Banmei Takahashi’s giallo-esque home invasion thriller is at heart about insecurity, a feeling of anxiety and ever impending doom under the watchful eyes of a judgemental society. 

At least, Yasuko (Keiko Takahashi) feels the eyes of her neighbours keenly on her, nervously attempting to live up to the role that’s been assigned to her as a moderately affluent housewife in a nice middle-class area that is nevertheless full of hazards even if many of them are social and psychological rather than directly physical. We can feel her discomfort when an anonymous neighbour passive aggressively returns her rubbish to her front door when she attempts to throw it out on the incorrect day, her husband’s (Shiro Shimomoto) advice simply to make sure she follows the bin day timetable correctly in the future. Another neighbour whose face is also not seen later stares at her when she drops a tissue that has been placed in her letterbox by a salesman (Daijiro Tsutsumi) who is harassing her, forcing Yasuko to pick it back up and take to her own apartment to dispose of lest she be judged for failing to obey this simple rule of urban living despite realising that the tissue likely contains unpleasant bodily fluids. 

The great mystery is why Yasuko, who clearly finds the salesman’s attentions threatening, does not immediately hang up when he calls her but continues to listen to his ominous conversation which heavily implies he is close by and watching her. Previously he’d daubed an obscene message on her front door branding her as “sexually frustrated” which as it turns out may not be far off the mark. Her husband is largely absent and often works away. When he returns she tries to wake him up after putting their son to bed, but he’s dead to the world and leaves the next morning having explained that he’ll be away the next three nights due to a colleague falling ill. Among the junk mail delivered to their flat were a series of business cards for cabaret bars that he jokingly suggested keeping, though as it turns out he really is at work and not spinning a yarn for a three-day jaunt with a mistress even if you could make a case that he’s in an extra-marital affair with his career. Yasuko almost says as much when she calls and tells him she’s scared but he refuses to come home, crying out that he obviously has no regard for his wife and child. 

It’s clear that the economic demands of the late Bubble era have endangered the traditional family even as they’ve provided a level of financial comfort that enables Yasuko to live in this “nice” apartment even if it’s perhaps only ordinarily nice for a middling middle-class couple living a stereotypically middle-class suburban life. Yasuko’s sense of anxiety partly stems from being constantly observed by those around her in an alienating urban environment but also suggests an insecurity in her social status which is after all dependent on a financial security which may be about to disappear as the Bubble bursts. The home is also a burden, and the space behind the door one of isolation rather than safety that leaves her feeling vulnerable and alone in the continual absence of her husband. 

Tellingly all of the voices she hears other than his (and their son’s) are filtered as if they were speaking to her via telephone. She has two handsets in her home, one belonging to the phone itself, black with an answering machine, and the other to the intercom, white and wall-mounted, which is intended to give her control over her door but which in the end offers little comfort just like the near pointless chain-lock intended to keep strangers at arm’s length but in reality easily breakable. In this society of ultra-politeness simply not answering an urgent knocking may not be an option, but behind the door Yasuko is also lonely so perhaps those nuisance cold calls telling her she’s won a cruise, encouraging her to take up English conversation classes, or maybe join a cult, are not really so much of a nuisance at all simultaneously interrupting her loneliness while also penetrating the protective sanctuary of the private space of the home much as the salesman will eventually do in physically breaking a protective barrier. 

When Yasuko fights back, she does so with a housewife’s weapons such as carving forks and chopping boards even picking up her son’s rollerblades to enlist him in the resistance. Takahashi films the final confrontation from above in a complex aerial shot that suggests a literal cat and mouse game as if Yasuko were intent on ejecting a stubborn rodent from her home, the rounded, doorless entranceways between rooms almost like oversized mouse holes in a scene from a cartoon. The question is whether Yasuko can in fact protect this space, a space which represents her family, in overcoming her own anxieties and the latent dark desire which draws her towards her stalker in her loneliness and lack of fulfilment. Yet the answer doesn’t quite lie in perfecting the persona of the perfect housewife even if it could on one level be argued that she’s saved by another kind of male protector but in taking care of business and reasserting her control over the space by means of resetting its boundaries very much on her own terms.

Door is released in the UK on blu-ray 30th October courtesy of Third Window Films.

Restoration trailer (English subtitles)

Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一,  Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, Atsushi Yoshioka, 2014)

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A collection of confused nine-year-olds decides the best way to solve all their problems is to start a band in charming kids ensemble movie, Hello! Junichi (ハロー!純一). Co-directed by Katsuhito Ishii, Kanoko Kawaguchi, and Atsushi Yoshioka, the film is more linear and less surreal than most of Ishii’s other work but has a refreshing take on the childhood adventure movie as the kids each deal with their various problems many of which still plague the adults around them. 

After all as kindhearted rocker Takao (Ryu Morioka) admits, the children aren’t really all that different from us. Shy and a little on the timid side, Junichi (Amon Kabe) is a peripheral member of his friendship group and perpetual fall guy who lists his only talent as the ability to carry everybody’s bags. His main problem is that he borrowed a rabbit-shaped eraser from his crush, Maeda, about a month ago and is too shy to return it. Now all he can think about is whether he should pluck up the courage or pretend to have forgotten. Things get more complicated when a new student teacher, the beautiful Miss Anna (Hikari Mitsushima), joins his school and confiscates the eraser as part of a cruel power game before agreeing to give it back if he helps her find out who scratched an offensive word into the side of her flashy car. 

Miss Anna is either the best teacher in the world or the absolute worst. She arrives dressed for a night out and puts on a cutie pie act for her dejected middle-aged boss Achikita (Yoshiyuki Morishita) which she immediately drops as soon as he leaves the room inappropriately giving the children far too much information about her personal life but they do at least get some maths out of it. She also smokes by an oil can round the back of the building and talks like an aggressive high school girl when her boss’ back is turned, but eventually comes round to her responsibility as a teacher after bonding with the kids. 

In comparison to some, Junichi’s problems aren’t really all that big except that his parents have to work late so he often has to prepare dinner for himself and his philosophising grandpa (Tatsuya Gashuin). Kuramoto (Yohei Hotta) meanwhile is beginning to act out at school because he’s got problems at home caused by his father’s gambling addiction which forces his mother (Chizuru Ikewaki) to run herself ragged just to stay afloat. With Miss Anna’s help, the kids decide to put on a concert for Mrs Kuramoto’s birthday which might on one level be charmingly naive but does in the end seem to cheer her up while allowing them to bond over their shared issues many of which are romantic in nature. 

During the opening sequence in the park, child actor Machida (Shoma Suginomori) had given the other boys some grown up love advice he picked up on set which amounted to getting girls to like you by giving them cliched compliments such as remarking on the beauty of their smile. It’s not terribly good advice and a little a bit patronising not mention insincere, but amusingly enough is the same approach eventually taken by Takao when he and Miss Anna awkwardly try to address their mutual attraction. In the end, she has to concede that she doesn’t know what to say either and they end up having a rather childish conversation about favourite foods which is all to say it doesn’t get any easier and the adults don’t necessarily know much more than the kids. 

Then again, there are some distinctly bad examples in Achikita’s thankfully ineffective attempt at workplace harassment and stalking of Miss Anna even if he eventually gives the most important life lesson in dressing down a trio of teenage bullies by telling them they have to learn love and appreciation or they’ll be weak men incapable of protecting anyone. Protecting people is something Junichi’s been worried about too, especially after failing to act when he spotted female classmate Tanaka (Rio Sasaki) duct taped to a pole by the bullies though she thankfully managed to save herself while uttering some particularly choice language for a nine-year-old. Still as his grandfather tells him he’s an unpolished stone. He has a weak side and a strong side and is still in the process of settling though the real business of growing up may be knowing which to be when. Charmingly quirky and infinitely warmhearted, Ishii, Kawaguchi, and Yoshioka masterfully capture an authentic sense of childhood anxiety while suggesting that none us is really so different after all. 

Hello! Junichi is out now the UK on blu-ray as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Party 7 (Katsuhito Ishii, 2000)

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“This shit’s for real.” according to the front desk guy at Hotel New Mexico, an out of the way spot just perfect for those looking to lay low for a little while. Like a lot of Katsuhito Ishii’s work, Party 7 is essentially a series of self-contained vignettes which eventually collide following a series of bizarre coincidences revolving around some money stolen from the mob, a two-way mirror in a regular hotel room, and the receptionist’s tendency to almost literally shoot the shit. 

Following a brief prologue, Ishii opens with striking animated sequence which introduces each of the main players with an arcade game aesthetic and explains that Miki (Masatoshi Nagase) has stolen money from the mob and is currently on the run which is why he’s turned up at the infinitely weird Hotel New Mexico. The running gag is that Miki thinks he’s holed up somewhere no one will find him, but sure enough a series of “friends” soon turn up in part thanks to a loose-lipped travel agent. The fact that people can find it so easily dampens the impression of the Hotel New Mexico as some kind of interstitial space. It’s not so much existing in a weird parallel world as a bit run down and staffed by a series of eccentrics. It does however have a “peep room” hidden behind a two-way mirror where “Captain Banana” (Yoshio Harada) is attempting to pass his knowledge on to the young Okita (Tadanobu Asano), the son of a recently deceased friend who has been repeatedly arrested for voyeurism. 

Captain Banana’s insistence on his surreal superhero suit is in a way ironic, if perhaps hinting at the super empowerment of accepting one’s authentic self. “It’s your soul,” he tells Okita, “it’s screaming ‘I want to peep’.’” Meanwhile, Miki gets into an argument with his ex-girlfriend Kana (Akemi Kobayashi) who has turned up in the hope of reclaiming money that he owes her. Kana too seems to be less than rigorous with the truth if perhaps emotionally authentic. She’s now now engaged to a nerdy guy having somewhat misrepresented herself as the innocent girl next-door type. Her refusal to let her fiancé into her apartment perhaps hints at a more literal barrier to intimacy or at least that she is intent on preventing him from seeing her true self. What she doesn’t know is that her fiancé hasn’t been completely honest either, in part because he thinks she’s out of his league and is insecure in their romance. 

Miki too maybe somewhat insecure, having run off with the gang’s money after hearing them bad mouth his associate Sonoda (Keisuke Horibe) who has now been charged with killing him and getting the money back. But Sonoda too has reasons to doubt the boss’ affection for him after Miki and the others point out that gifts he thought were so valuable are really just cheap knock offs that suggest the boss thinks very little of him at all. Okita’s psychiatrist tells him that there are “no rules in making friends”, and maybe in a strange way that’s what everyone is trying to do. Kana wanted the money to overcome her anxiety about having no friends or family to invite to the wedding, while all Sonoda wanted was the boss’ approval and though Miki had deliberately gone somewhere he thought no one would find him nevertheless attracts a series of followers. 

Even the receptionists seem to be desperate for human contact with their strange stories of poo falling from the sky and bizarre approach to hospitality. “The point is whether you believe it or not,” one tells the other after spinning what sounds like a yarn but then again might not be. Ishii’s zany world has its own surreal logic culminating in a piece of cosmic irony and defined by coincidence as the otherwise unrelated stories begin to come together and slowly find their way to Hotel New Mexico but seems to suggest the point is in the serendipity of the meeting and its concurrent authenticity even if a literal shot in the arm is a less than ideal way of brokering a friendship.

Party 7 is released in the UK on blu-ray on 17th July as part of Third Window Films’ Katsuhito Ishii Collection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

GO (Isao Yukisada, 2001)

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“We never had a country” a student at a North Korean school in Japan fires back, hinting at his feelings of displacement in being asked to remain loyal to a place he never knew while the culture in which he was born and raised often refuses to accept him. The hero of Isao Yukisada’s Go is not so much searching for an identity as a right to be himself regardless of the labels that are placed on him but is forced to contend with various layers of prejudice and discrimination in a rigidly conformist society.

As he points out, when they call him “Zainichi” it makes it sound as if he is only a “temporary resident” who does not really belong in Japan and will eventually “return” to his “home culture”. In essence, “Zainichi” refers to people of Korean ethnicity who came to Japan during the colonial era and their descendants who are subject to a special immigration status which grants them rights of residency but not citizenship. Sugihara’s (Yosuke Kubozuka) situation is complicated by the fact that his father (Tsutomu Yamazaki) has a North Korean passport, making him a minority even with the Korean-Japanese community. He attends a North Korean school where speaking Japanese is forbidden and is educated in the tenets of revolutionary thought which are of course entirely contrary to the consumerist capitalism of contemporary Japan. 

His father eventually consents to swap his North Korean passport for a South Korean one mostly it seems so he can take a trip to Hawaii with his wife (Shinobu Otake) which seems to Sugihara a trivial reason for making such a big decision especially as it caused the lines of communication to break down with his bother who returned to North. Yet it seems like what each of them is seeking is an expansion of internal borders, the right not to feel bound by questions of national identity in order to live in a place of their own choosing. “I felt like a person for the first time,” Sugihara explains on being given the opportunity to choose his nationality even if it is only the “narrow” choice between North and South Korea. 

But on the other hand he wonders if it would make his life easier if he had green skin so that his “non-Japaneseness” would be obvious. Sugihara reminds us several times that this is a love story, but he delays revealing that he is a Zainichi Korean to his girlfriend because he fears she will reject him once she knows. On visiting Sakurai’s (Ko Shibasaki) home, it becomes obvious that she comes from a relatively wealthy, somewhat conservative family. Her father, who is unaware Sugihara is Korean-Japanese, immediately asks him if he likes “this country” but is irritated when Sugihara asks him if he really knows the meaning behind the various words for “Japan” again hinting at the meaninglessness of such distinctions. When he eventually does tell Sakurai that he is ethnically Korean, her reaction surprises both of them as she recalls her father telling her not to date Korean or Chinese men on account of their “dirty” blood. 

Such outdated views are unfortunately all too common even at the dawn of the new millennium. Even so, Sakurai had not wanted to reveal her full name because she was embarrassed that it is so “very Japanese” while conversely Sugihara takes ownership of the name “Lee Jong-ho”. He embraces the “very Japanese” tradition of rakugo, and hangs out in the Korean restaurant where his mother works dressed in vibrant hanbok. Given a book of Shakespeare by his studious friend, he is struck by the quote which opens the film which states that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and wonders what difference a name makes when its the same person underneath it. 

Perhaps his father’s admission that he always found a way to win wasn’t so off base after all, nor his eventual concession that Sugihara may have it right when he rejects all this talk of “Zainichi” and “Japanese” as “bullshit” and resolves to “wipe out borders”. He insists on being “himself” or perhaps a giant question mark, and discovers that Sakurai may have come to the same conclusion in realising that all that really mattered was what she saw and felt. Yukisada captures the anxieties of the age in the pulsing rhythms of his youthful tale which keeps its heroes always on the run, but is in the end a love story after all and filled with an equally charming romanticism. 

GO is released on blu-ray in the UK on 22nd May courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Electric Dragon 80000v (エレクトリック·ドラゴン 80000V, Sogo Ishii, 2001)

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“How do we repress the animal instinct to explode?” asks a narratorial voice (Masakatsu Funaki) in Sogo Ishii’s 50-minute cyberpunk fever dream Electric Dragon 80000v (エレクトリック·ドラゴン 80000V). The supercharged hero is indeed filled with a kind of rage, not least because society seems intent on trying to “regulate” him while he later comes into contact with an opposing force whose job it is to control the electric flow though in a curious way the two men perhaps free each other from their mutual oppression and regain the right to run on their own current. 

“Dragon Eye” Morrison (Tadanobu Asano), as he comes to be called, got zapped by a pylon when he was a child which altered his brain, awakening the dragon within by “damaging” the part of our neurology unchanged from our reptile ancestors that controls emotion and acts of desire. Doctors seem intent on “correcting” this “fault” in his circuitry through electro-shock therapy to force him to conform to mainstream society while he does admittedly seem to have some problems with violence and impulse control. He self-regulates by chaining himself to a table and “recharging” overnight while easing his frustrations through playing electric guitar, boxing, and hanging out with his calming lizard friends 

Meanwhile, Thunderbolt Buddha (Masatoshi Nagase) is literally divided in two, one half of his face covered in a metallic Buddha mask hinting at the inner duality which at times literally leaves him at war with himself while wandering around with an electric metre trying to control not just his own flow but everyone’s. “He’s the electricity man! All its wavelengths are his!” the narrator explains, while Thunderbolt Buddha turns his head to the Buddha side and an old lady prays to him in his infinite calmness. Not so long before, he’d been acting as a vigilante thief, like Dragon Eye in the ring only darkly exorcising his frustration through violence attacking the corrupting forces of the contemporary society. Perhaps jealous, or just seeking an escape, Thunderbolt Buddha gradually dismantles all of Dragon’s Eye’s means of self-regulation, disappearing lizards and chopping his electric guitar into a series of uniform triangles. Dragon Eye tries to put it back together, but the guitar doesn’t play the right tune anymore, now echoing Thunderbolt Buddha’s eerie discordance. “I just wanted to see you angry” Thunderbolt Buddha admits, trying to engineer a battle that will decide each of their fates. 

Dragon Eye’s power is in one sense manmade, he got he got it from a pylon which is after all an attempt to regulate natural energy into something useful to a modern society, whereas Thunderbolt Buddha was as his name suggests was struck by lightning and imbued with 20,000v of naturally generated pure electric charge. As the two men square off against each other on a Tokyo rooftop, Dragon Eye once again marshals the power of modernity, ripping open the electric power supply and using it to supercharge himself before turning it on Thunderbolt Buddha who has no such recourse to a greater power. In the end, they are perhaps both freed. Thunderbolt Buddha’s mask falls to the ground while a calmed Dragon Eye retrieves his lizard and returns home no longer locking himself into his electric table but freed of its restraints. 

Shooting in a crisp black and white, Ishii returns to the punk sensibilities of his earlier career in a tale of a free spirit seeking escape from a conformist society and rebelling against the forces quite literally intent on regulating his brain. Echoing the avant-garde cinema of the 1960s, Ishii uses anarchic title cards with strangely drawn, elongated figures accompanying the voiceover narration and aggressive guitar music as the two men spark in conflict each threatening to explode, already overloaded with the alternating currents of contemporary civility. “Let’s send them to hell, your demons and mine” Thunderbolt Buddha insists, ironically echoing Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo the Iron Man as the pair bend the electric city to their will and finally find release in a mutual explosion that catapults each of them free of the magnetic pull of social conformity towards a world of freedom in self-regulation and independent flow.

Electric Dragon 80000v is released on blu-ray in the UK on 6th March courtesy of Third Window Films.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Island Closest to Heaven (天国にいちばん近い島, Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1984)

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On its publication in the mid-1960s, Katsura Morimura’s autobiographical travelogue The Island Closest to Heaven (天国にいちばん近い島, Tengoku ni Ichiban Chikai Shima) became something of a publishing phenomenon and is credited with creating a romanticised image of the Pacific islands in the post-war Japanese imagination. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1984 film adaptation in fact prominently features adverts for the UTA New Caledonia tour and acts as something like a tourist information video showcasing the idyllic island scenery and well appointed resort accommodation if also later featuring the decidedly less well appointed establishments on the other side of town where the locals live and and work. 

It is however first and foremost a vehicle for Kadokawa idol star Tomoyo Harada who had made her debut in Obayashi’s The Little Girl Who Conquered Time and was now onto her third lead having starred in Curtain Call earlier in the year which Haruki Kadokawa had directed himself. As such, the film is only loosely based on Morimura’s novel, recasting the heroine as a recently bereaved 16-year-old embarking on a coming-of-age adventure while travelling overseas looking for herself and a sense of the safety and stability she experienced before her father’s death. 

In the prologue sequence which opens the film, shot with a muted, pink-tinted colour filter, a younger Mari sits on the edge of a bridge with her father holding her from behind. As both she and her father are dressed in yukata, as are others who pass them on the bridge, we can assume that it is summer and possibly around the time of Bon festival which adds an extra degree of poignancy to their conversation in which her father quietly clearly anticipates his own death. He tells her about a distant island far to the south and close enough to Heaven for God to call on where it is always warm and sunny and the people always happy. Mari asks for the name of the place and is told it is called New Caledonia, possibly a name her father picked out of the air without thinking but becomes to her a symbol of the bond that existed between them and place she must visit now that her father is no longer physically present in her life. 

What she’s looking for is in a sense a path back to her father or at least a means a coming to terms with his absence. Her mother (Kayo Matsuo) may appear somewhat indifferent, but it’s clear that it’s a kind of pride she feels in her daughter’s first steps into adulthood knowing that she has raised a determined young woman if one with her head in the clouds like her father. Her sentiment is later echoed by an older woman (Nobuko Otowa) who has come to New Caledonia in order to make peace with the death of her husband 39 years previously when his submarine was sunk during the war, stating that all these years later her abiding memory is pride that she fell in love with someone she could be proud of. “Love is the story of your whole life” she tells Mari, who is herself just beginning to understand that life is a process of love and loss as she searches for her island and eventually finds it in the eyes of a local boy who yearns for an island far to the north where it’s always bright and sunny and the people are always happy. 

Mari’s interactions on the island are torn between two men, the young Taro (Ryoichi Takayanagi) who is fascinated by the idea of Japan where his grandfather first came from to dig nickel, and a much older man, Yuichi (Toru Minegishi), who seems to be arrested, stuck on the island and unable to move forward with his life because of a youthful broken heart. Mari reminds him of the young woman he loved and lost, trying to recapture the magic with a moment that seems to reference Jules Verne’s The Green Ray, but of course failing to do so. There is something uncomfortable in their relationship given that Mari is only 16 and this man is perhaps already in his 40s, yet her decision to leave the safety of the tour group and venture astray with him to find what she is looking for rather than what the tour guide wants to show her demonstrates her independent spirt and impending adulthood in taking an active control over her life and future. 

In this way the island is a liminal space in more ways than one, symbolically connecting the mortal world and the other while allowing Mari to transition into adulthood as symbolised by her return home now no longer wearing her glasses in having opened her eyes to a fuller reality. Nevertheless, the film does follow the line of the book which is very of its time in its presentation of the indigenous community which is bound up with the idea of a smiling island people lazing in the sun of a tropical paradise while possessing profound spiritual knowledge. Mari’s literal coming of age is symbolised by a fever she endures after being stung by a sting ray, coming to during a tribal dance and then collapsing again to awaken as if reborn into adulthood.  

After this transition it’s implied that her relationship with Taro will have to end, that this brief summer adventure like so many in Obayashi’s films was just about making memories to carry forward in the further course of life. But then as her seemingly unburdened tour group friend had pointed out, Mari found Taro by chance twice before and so may someday find him again just as Mari’s intervention has earned Yuichi and his first love a second chance no longer so enthral to the illusionary power of the green ray but making choices informed by the realities of love that may still be “romantic” if no longer quite so naive. Shifting into a more contemplative register than other similarly themed Kadokawa idol movies, The Island Closest to Heaven is one of Obayashi’s most straightforward features save for its brief use of colour filters in the opening and closing scenes and the lengthy title sequence which draws inspiration from classic Hollywood melodrama, but engages with some of his key themes in the romantic nostalgia of love and loss as his heroine comes to a new understanding of herself while bidding goodbye to the past. 

The Island Closest to Heaven is released on blu-ray on 17th October courtesy of Third Window Films as part of the Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 80s Kadokawa Years box set alongside School in the Crosshairs, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and His Motorbike, Her Island.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Theme song performed by Tomoyo Harada

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle, Arthur Harari, 2021)

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For most people, the Pacific War ended in 1945. For Hiroo Onoda it may in a sense never have ended though he laid down his arms in 1974, 30 years after his initial dispatch, having spent the intervening three decades pursuing guerrilla warfare in the Philippine jungle the last two of them entirely alone. Arthur Harari’s three-hour existential epic, Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (Onoda, 10 000 nuits dans la jungle), explores the psychological dimensions of his quasi-religious conviction in the righteousness of a mission which is in one sense no more than to survive along with his refusal to accept that the war is over and his personal struggle has been pointless. 

Immediately in opening the film in 1974 with a young man identified only as a “tourist” (Taiga Nakano) arriving on the island in search of Onoda (Kanji Tsuda), Harari draws a direct contrast between these two arrivals and subsequent departures. As he says, the Tourist is just that in town for a specific purpose after which he will leave and though you might be able to say the same of Onoda who came to the island of Lubang in late 1944 his reality was very different. On luring him out of the jungle by playing the patriotic war song he had sung with the other soldiers who unlike him accepted the surrender, the Tourist poignantly tells Onoda that he has travelled to over 50 countries whereas Onoda in a certain sense has never left Japan. “This island belongs to us” he’s fond of insisting seeing it as a piece of the Japanese empire which others are trying to take from him but he alone must defend. 

As we discover, the young Onoda (Yuya Endo) had wanted to become a pilot but washed out of the training program because of a fear of heights and was subsequently put forward for a kamikaze squadron. The irony of his life is that he is a man who refused to die for the emperor, his will to survive bringing him to the attention of Major Taniguchi (Issey Ogata) of the notorious Nakano spy school who sells his students a line that they are the good guys helping to liberate East Asia from Western imperialism. Trained in guerrilla warfare part of Onoda’s mission is to foster an uprising in the local population whom he assumes will also oppose American influence never realising that he is in fact a part of a destructive colonising force they will also seek to repel not least because of the way they have been treated by Japanese forces. 

Onoda’s first meeting with his captain on arriving on Lubang is interrupted by the arrival of the mayor of a nearby town who has come to complain that Japanese soldiers have been stealing food supplies from local farmers. This comes as a surprise to Onoda who is obviously not fully aware of the reality on the ground. His initial orders are largely ignored by the remaining NCOs who get up and leave during his briefing knowing that what he’s proposing is impossible. These men are already battle weary, many of them are sick, and they are running low on supplies. Onoda is 22 and fresh faced, arriving full of energy and patriotic zeal assuming these men are simply lazy or lack ideological commitment. He has no grounds to wield authority and no combat experience that would permit him to understand the circumstances in which he finds himself. In an especial irony, his first kill occurs after the war has (for everyone else) ended and he will himself go on to commit acts of atrocity against the local population which he justifies as acts of war. 

The military song which he is fond of singing celebrates there being no more bandits, yet banditry is essentially what he has been reduced to calling into question any idea of heroism which might be attributed to his refusal to accept the wartime defeat. In his Nakano spy school training, Onoda had been encouraged to ignore the accepted rules of war, that all is permissible in the pursuit of victory. He is also told that the prize for the “secret war” he is conducting will be a “secret glory” that goes unrecognised by others while he alone will possess true integrity in knowing that he never wavered in his mission. Yet there is something in him which weakens when he encounters the Tourist and is told that most of Japan believes him to be dead, rendering his struggle an irrelevance. 

He begins to admit the concept of surrender but only if given new orders from Taniguchi whose contradictory teachings have informed the course of his life, yet Taniguchi like many of his generation in the Japan of 1974 does not want to face his wartime past. The bookshop he now runs sells no military books and he claims not to remember Onoda or Lubang refusing his responsibility for his role in the conflict now filled with shame and regret. Yet it’s also possible that Onoda misunderstood the nature of the mission he’d been assigned, that in saving him from the kamikaze squadron because he did not want to die, Taniguchi gave him only one order – to survive. “You do not have the right to die” he reminds the recruits while giving them the ultra-individualist mantra that they must be their own officers which is in essence the paradoxical instruction to obey no orders but their own meaning that Onoda was always free to accept defeat. 

The psychological consequences of doing so, however, may have been too great. Coming of age in a militarised society, he already feels himself emasculated and embarrassed by his failure to become a pilot essentially because he is afraid to die. An awkward meeting with his father (played by film director Nobuhiro Suwa) resembles that of a Spartan woman sending her son to war with the instruction to return with his shield or on it. To return in defeat is psychologically impossible and suicide forbidden and so the only choice is inertia. In this Onoda may be hiding in the jungle unable to face a post-war future, descending into delusional conspiracy when presented with evidence that the war is over choosing to see the attempts of others to discourage him from his mission as proof of its importance, as if he and the remaining soldier sticking with him are key players in geopolitical manoeuvring worthy of such an elaborate plot. To believe the world is wrong is easier than to accept that he’s wasted his life in service of a mistaken ideal while failing to prove himself a man by the standards of a heavily militarised society. 

He’s tempted out of his delusion only by the Tourist who confronts him with the face of a new Japan entirely unknown to him, a Japan of economic prosperity, of the Shinkansen, of democracy. Being taken off the island means he must finally leave his dreams and delusions behind to enter a new post-war reality. Harari frames the island of Lubang as a psychological realm, the topography of Onoda’s delusion, but is also mindful of the islanders living outside it whom Onoda terrorises under the justification of war no better than a bandit in his quest for survival. In Harari’s oneiric landscapes, Onoda’s vistas are forever haunted by the spectres of his latent regret in the reflections of the boy he once was who came to Lubang to prove himself a man only to leave it a ghost. 

Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle opens in UK cinemas April 15 courtesy of Third Window Films. It will also be released on blu-ray May 16 in a set which also features an interview with actor Kanji Tsuda plus an interview with director Arthur Harari, DOP Tom Harari and assistant director Benjamin Papin.

Original trailer (English subtitles)