Tag: Yuka Itaya

Survive Style 5+ (Gen Sekiguchi, 2004)

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“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)

Good Luck (グッドラック, Shin Adachi, 2025)

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Taro’s (Hiroki Sano) problem as far as he sees it, is that he lacks self-confidence and is unable to understand why other might like him, though he fears few do. That’s especially true of his girlfriend/financial backer Yuki (Saki Kato) about whom he makes a short documentary because he thought it would be good to make a film about the person who’s most important to him. But Yuki fires back that the person who’s most important to him is himself, so he should turn the camera around, but that’s exactly what he doesn’t want to do even if the film is really about himself anyway. 

To that extent the film backfires in that, when he’s unexpectedly invited to a festival in Beppu and and convinced by Yuki to go because she’s irritated by just how little effort he seems to put in, all anyone can talk about is Yuki who they say must love him very much or at any rate has a lot of patience and understanding. This is doubly true of the lady running the Bluebird Theatre who says out loud live during the Q&A that his film was boring, and she only chose it because of the contrast between how mediocre the film was and Yuki’s force of personality. She suggests that Taro doesn’t know what sort of films he wants to make, or even why he’s making them in the first place, and she’s right.

Awkwardly, this sense of confusion seems bound up with his relationship with Yuki which is unbalanced in his mind because she asked him out rather than the other way round. As he tells Miki (Hana Amano), an extremely extroverted young woman with an amazing laugh that he meets on his travels, his biggest regret in life is not being able to tell he girl he liked that he liked her in high school. This indecision and lack of confidence have left him directionless in his film career and uncertain in his relationships while it seems clear Yuki is not really his muse despite what others might say about her star quality if only by virtue of how sorry they feel for her for having to put up with Taro.

But then again, he’s basically swept away Miki too who hijacks his last couple of days touring the saunas around the hot springs resort. She explains that she likes to travel alone because she difficulties interacting with other people, though she gets along much better with strangers which is why she clicks so quickly with Taro even if he’s only hanging out with her by virtue of being too polite/spineless to decline her invitations. The pair end up echoing Before Sunrise in their walking tour of the natural attractions of the area, while Miki tells him that her biggest regret in life is that she hasn’t achieved anything that society values even if there are things that she’s good at and fears that she won’t be able to do the things that she wants to do before she dies. 

Truth be told, Taro doesn’t really do much for Miki or ask any real followup questions while simultaneously beginning to fantasise about her as recounted through an incrediblely meta sequence taking place in his treehouse room. Nevertheless, he begins to see in her the kind of muse he’s been looking for along with discovering why he wants to make films and what kind of films he wants to make. But in then in true Adachi fashion, maybe Taro is just as superficial as he says he is and later drawn to another pretty woman on a train all while not making that much of an effort to get back to Yuki whose father has had a heart attack to which Taro seems mostly indifferent. There are certainly lots of strange women around Taro from the gloomy innkeeper in Beppo to the gaggle of ladies at a shrine convinced he’s an old high school friend, but as much as he has a talent for encountering the surreal, Taro doesn’t seem to know what to do with it and remains a somewhat passive observer to afraid to voice his feelings, simultaneously making films only about himself that nevertheless express nothing of his own soul.

Good Luck screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Moon (月, Yuya Ishii, 2023)

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If you can judge a society by the way it cares for its most vulnerable, then at least according to Yuya Ishii’s The Moon (月, Tsuki), adapted from the novel by Yo Hemmi, Japan is not doing very well. Inspired by a real life incident in which a disaffected young man went on a rampage murdering patients at a facility for the disabled claiming they were a drain on national resources, the film probes into some dark areas of the human psyche asking what people really think deep down and who we do and don’t see as being human just like us.

Blocked writer Yoko (Rie Miyazawa) only takes the job at a care facility because her literary career has stalled and her husband (Joe Odagiri) is out of work. Each of them is still reeling from the death of their three-year-old son who was born with a heart defect and suffered brain damage during an operation that meant he never spoke and was fed through a feeding tube. Working at the care facility brings up painful memories and directly confronts Yoko with realities of her son’s life and death while she later discovers that she is pregnant again and isn’t sure whether or not to have the baby fearing it may have the same condition and knowing that as a woman over 40 there is an increased chance she may give birth to a child who has complex needs.

In many ways it’s Yoko’s own reaction to her pregnancy which underlines the film, the lunar imagery intensely linked with that of her ultrasounds while she reckons with her own feeling of perhaps not wanting to bear an “abnormal” child, as someone puts it. Of course, this very personal sentiment is informed by the loss of her son and the experience of living and caring for him for the three years he was alive, but it also informs her perspective on the care, or lack of it, sees at the facility where patients are sometimes confined to their rooms indefinitely, left covered in their own excrement, or allowed to harm themselves through lack of stimulation. Like Yoko most of the other orderlies seem to have no medical training and two in particular mistreat the people in their care for their own amusement. On witnessing an orderly strike a patient for no reason while frogmarching him back to his room, she asks him if that’s really okay but he just replies that okay or not it’s the way they do things here. She tries to take her concerns to the facility’s director, but he basically tells her the same thing and even threatens her employment if she continues to make a fuss. 

Yoko closely identifies with another woman who happened to be born on exactly the same day she was yet has been confined to bed for 10 years and is assumed to be unable to communicate. According to another orderly, also called Yoko (Fumi Nikaido), Ki-chan could walk and was partially sighted when she arrived but someone decided that it would be easier to care for her if she stayed in her room so now her muscles are too wasted to walk while they also covered up her windows because they thought dim lighting would keep her more docile. Essentially, they further disabled her for their own convenience and concluded that because she could not communicate with them in a way they considered usual that she had nothing to communicate. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that biting the other Yoko’s arm, for instance, is also communication as are some of the behaviours exhibited by the other patients which the orderlies respond to with force or violence.

Shoko, the girlfriend of another orderly Sato (Hayato Isomura), is deaf and remarks to the other Yoko that she doesn’t need to hear to be able to understand yet a value judgement seems to have been placed on these people’s lives based solely on their ability to communicate through conventional means. Yoko is accused of romanticising notions of disability, while many people may outwardly say they believe those with physical or intellectual disabilities are equal to themselves and deserve the same levels of respect and dignity they are also unwilling to deal directly with the unpleasant side of their care such as cleaning up bodily fluids which may have strong and penetrating odours. Both the other Yoko, who has literary aspirations of her own, and Sato make frequent reference the stench of reality, something which often left out or not spoken of. The other Yoko accuses Yoko of leaving the smell of decay out of her award-winning book on the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 which she later reveals was something urged by her editor who instructed her to soften the edges to create a story that readers would find uplifting and inspirational.

One of the unpleasant things glossed over about 1923 earthquake was the pogrom against Koreans which took place in its wake, something that is tacitly referenced during the attack on the care facility as the killer determines to ask each of the victims if they have a soul despite having already decided that those who cannot speak do not. During the pogrom, those suspected of being Korean were often asked to pronounce certain words to see if they had a Korean accent, only many people from other areas of Japan also pronounce them in the same way so the test proved nothing. The killer wants to see themselves as “normal”, that their way of thinking is just the same as everyone else’s only they don’t have the courage to speak and that their course of action is one most people tacitly support because they also do not believe that the people at the care facility are human or that they have a soul.

Raising her concerns, Yoko has a long philosophical conversation with Sato which doubles as a self-interrogation while it is also in some senses true that the people at the care facility are each refractions of herself. In any case, the conditions and contradictions of the facility appear to place a strain on the mental health of those who work there who are encouraged to simply get used to the way the system works rather than attempt to change it. Sato complains that he struggles to discern dream from reality, while reality itself is often distorted by a lack of desire to talk about anything that might be unpleasant or inconvenient.

Even a discussion that might have been unpleasant or inconvenient to have is interrupted in the closing moments, though the most important things are indeed said while Yoko and her husband are able to sit face to face and begin rebuilding their relationship in the wake of the loss of their son. Ishii conjures an atmosphere of true dread as events slowly creep towards an inevitable conclusion, but also peppers Yoko’s life with small moments of joy if underscored by a searing horror that many are prepared to unsee until brought to a violent confrontation with the contradictions and hypocrisies that dwell deep within their own hearts.

The Moon screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Trailer (English subtitles)

A Hundred Flowers (百花, Genki Kawamura, 2022)

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An expectant father finds himself confronted with paternal anxiety and past trauma on learning that his mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in Genki Kawamura’s adaptation of his own novel, A Hundred Flowers (百花, Hyakka). A prolific film producer behind such hits as Lee Sang-il’s Rage and Tetsuya Nakashima’s Confessions, Kawamura also penned the international bestseller If Cats Disappeared from the World which was later adapted into a film starring Takeru Satoh and here makes his directorial debut with a semi-autobiographical exploration of memory and forgetting. 

Kawamura neatly signals his central concern in the opening scenes as Yuriko (Mieko Harada) seems to become unstuck in time, a withered dandelion on her kitchen table as she flits between swapping it for a new one and playing the piano eventually watching herself from an alternate temporal space. Her grown-up son Izumi (Masaki Suda) seems surprised to witness her decline on a visit home, running panicked through the streets looking for her only to find his mother sitting on the swings at the park muttering about “half fireworks”. When he approaches her she seems to mistake him for someone else, Izumi rejecting her too intimate hug and later making his exit earlier than expected, leaving the New Year food Yuriko has prepared uneaten and making an excuse about an emergency at work. 

The chase through the streets may have awakened traumatic memories in Izumi too, forcing him to remember another time as a child he came home and found his mother gone. Disappearing again, Yuriko is found at his old school, guided by a memory of a parents day at which Izumi read out sections of Osamu Dazai’s Run, Melos!, a story of a man running back to the city to save his friend before he is executed in his place. Thrown back into the past, Yuriko later berates the grown Izumi for his habit of wandering off, suggesting that he gets lost on purpose so that she’ll look for him which is perhaps what Yuriko is doing longing for her son to understand and forgive her for an act of childhood betrayal. Kawamura often places the camera directly behind Izumi’s head, following him as he chases the mother who he fears has forgotten him while he feels foolish in his inability to forget her despite the depth of his resentment. 

Ironically enough, Izumi and his heavily pregnant wife Kaori (Masami Nagasawa) both work at a music company developing a virtual idol whom they explain has been fed thousands of memories as data in order to improve her AI but ends up oddly soulless as if these fragments of moments in time are meaningless in isolation. His friend quips that maybe they should have given the AI the ability to forget, as if that would make it more “human” and relatable. Izumi is pretty sure he hasn’t forgotten anything important, but memory remakes itself every day and is in some ways selective. Though he holds his mother at arm’s length, he begins to put the past behind him in learning to forgive her and in the process regaining the happy memories of his earlier childhood that his trauma had taken from him. 

The flowers so closely associated with Yuriko who is often dressed in a bright yellow are perhaps another allusion to Dazai and his insistance on embracing the gift of a single dandelion as a kind of metaphor for the frustrated love between mother and son, while the half fireworks they later see also resemble a dandelion dispersing mimicking the continual scattering of Yuriko’s memories. Izumi remarks that it’s like her memories are being stolen while charting her decline as a depletion of her identity until there is nothing left of her at all, the various boxes in her apartment standing in for blocks of data slowly being shed. Shifting between the perspectives of mother and son who are each in some way blind to the other, Kawamura touches on the tactile quality of memory as one moment sparks another while for Yuriko time proceeds on a maddening loop of overlapping incidents that robs of her present, past, and future in equal measure. The irony may be that only in losing his mother does Izumi begin to find her again, searching for her within the halls of his own memory and rediscovering a sense of himself as a child that he had long forgotten. 

A Hundred Flowers screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival 

International trailer (English subtitles)

Unlock Your Heart (ひらいて, Rin Shuto, 2021)

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A straight-A student and popular girl enters a self-destructive tailspin on discovering her longterm crush has a secret girlfriend in Rin Shuto’s adaptation of the novel by Risa Wataya, Unlock Your Heart (ひらいて, Hirate). Wataya also penned the source material for Akiko Ohku’s Tremble All You Want and Hold Me Back, and while Shuto may shift away from Ohku’s quirky style she maintains and intensifies an underlying sense of unease in what has the potential to develop into an incredibly messy situation. 

As the film opens, popular girl Ai (Anna Yamada) walks away from a dance rehearsal and discovers fellow student Miyuki (Haruka Imo) collapsed by a tree next to a pouch containing her insulin. Barely conscious, Miyuki asks her for something sweet and Ai soon returns with some sugary juice. Unable to find to an efficient way of getting her to drink it, Ai passes the liquid from her own mouth in a literal kiss of life that seems have an unexpected effect on her. Meanwhile, after sneaking into the school late at night with some friends halfheartedly joking about stealing the exam papers, Ai raids the locker of her crush, Tatoe (Ryuto Sakuma), and discovers a series of love letters which turn out to be from Miyuki. 

For some reason this revelation turns Ai’s life upside-down even though she later reveals that she had been enduring the silent crush on Tatoe for some years without ever acting on it. It may partly be that Ai is popular and attractive and so the idea that someone may not find her desirable is destabilising, cutting to the quick of her teenage insecurity while pulling the rug out from under her if she had indeed thought of Tatoe as a kind of comfortable backstop or easy plan B. Enraged, she befriends Miyuki yet for unclear reasons, perhaps hoping to get some insider info on Tatoe, find out what it is Miyuki has and she doesn’t, or somehow break them up, but finally settles on seduction unexpectedly kissing her again in an echo of their awkward meet cute.  

At heart, Ai does not understand herself and is operating with no real plan. Each escalation seems to come as a surprise even to herself leaving her with moments of internal conflict gazing into a mirror wondering what it is she’s doing. On separate occasions, both Miyuki and Tatoe accuse her of lying and indeed she is, most particularly to herself in a wholesale denial of her own desires which fuels her impulsive and self-destructive behaviour. Others accuse her of being selfish and self-absorbed, unable to look beyond herself and indifferent to the feelings of others which is also in its way a reflection of the degree to which she is consumed by internal confusion, driven slowly out of her mind while taking out her frustration on those around her not least in her increasingly dark manipulation of Miyuki and Tatoe. In the end, as Tatoe points out, she’s little different from his abusive father in her need to possess and control but it’s the extreme control that she’s trying to exercise over herself and the desires she can not accept that is causing her self-destructive behaviour. 

Only Miyuki seems to be able to see through her, at least to an extent, yet it’s not entirely clear at first if she responds to Ai’s advances willingly or simply goes along with them because she has no other friends and is afraid Ai will reject her if she refuses. Ostracised by the students because of her diabetes which is of course a very visible condition in that it requires her to inject herself while at school, Miyuki is shy and lonely while required to keep her relationship with Tatoe a secret because of his abusive father. But as Miyuki later puts it in her letter, Ai isn’t quite as aloof as she’d like to pretend and acts with an unexpected tenderness and consideration, even a kind of vulnerability, in moments of intimacy that betray the true self otherwise stifled by anxiety and internalised shame. With a persistent air of danger and unease spurred by Ai’s impulsive and chaotic nature, Shuto’s intense drama reaches its climax in its deliberately abrupt conclusion perfectly capturing the heroine’s moment of realisation imbued with all of her idiosyncratic messiness. 

Unlock Your Heart screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)

37 Seconds (Hikari, 2019)

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37 Seconds poster“We’re just like everybody else” the heroine of Hikari’s debut feature 37 Seconds replies in bemusement when a prospective date confesses he never thought he’d feel comfortable with “someone like” her. Quietly meditating on societal prejudice against disability, 37 Seconds takes its heroine on a journey of self discovery as a series of disappointments pushes her towards embracing a new side of herself as an individual in defiance of those who might feel they know what is best, or perhaps just most “appropriate”, for “someone like” her without bothering to consider how she might feel.

Softly spoken, 23-year-old Yuma (Mei Kayama) has cerebral palsy and uses a motorised wheelchair to get around. Although she has a degree of independence with a job as an assistant to a manga artist, her friend Sayaka now a giant YouTube star, to which she travels alone by train, Yuma otherwise has little life outside the home she shares with her increasingly overprotective mother Kyoko (Misuzu Kanno). Yuma’s dreams of becoming a manga artist in her own right are dealt a blow when she’s told that her style is too close to Sayaka’s, only Sayaka’s style is Yuma’s because Yuma is doing all the work while her friend steals the credit and gleefully gives interviews claiming she is 100% indie and has no assistants. Beginning to realise she’s being exploited, Yuma gets an idea when she spots some erotic manga abandoned in the park and starts ringing up magazines for work. One bites and likes her stuff but worries that her sex scenes lack authenticity because of her lack of experience. 

Though previously unbothered, Yuma decides to embrace her sexuality in the name of art but finds a series of obstacles in her way, not least among them her mother who continues to infantilise her claiming that she is too vulnerable to be allowed out alone because there are too many strange people in the world. Kyoko won’t let Yuma wear pretty dresses, or makeup, or go out in the same way other girls her age might, refusing to accept that her little girl has grown up and has the same desires as any other young woman including that to be independent. Unable to escape her mother’s control, Yuma begins lying to her to meet prospective dates but finds them all unsuitable until finally trying to hire a sex worker only for that to go horribly wrong too. It does however introduce her to the people who will change her life – empathetic sex worker Mai (Makiko Watanabe), and her assistant Toshiya (Shunsuke Daito), whom she meets in a love hotel corridor while waiting for a broken lift.

When Yuma first meets Mai, she’s in the company of another man with cerebral palsy using a wheelchair, Kuma – played by Yoshihiko Kumashiro, a real life activist raising awareness about sexuality in the disabled community whose life inspired Junpei Matsumoto’s 2017 feature Perfect Revolution. Seeing the warm and genuine relationship between Mai and Kuma gives Yuma a new hope that a different kind of life is possible, especially as Mai offers to take her under her wing. Having an older woman to confide in about things she could never discuss with her mother allows Yuma to explore her newfound desires with confidence knowing that there are people looking out for her and always ready to offer advice.

Not everyone, however, is quite so enlightened and Yuma’s problems are largely to do with the persistent social stigma she faces from the world around her as well as a resultant sense of internalised inferiority. Sayaka, her “friend”, views her as a kind of cash cow, taking advantage of her skills but denying her existence while Sayaka’s agent swings in the other direction by telling her she should go public because she’d get a lot of press once people know she employs a disabled woman as an assistant. The first place Yuma gets any kind of respect is the office of the erotic manga magazine where the boss treats her like any other prospective hire and offers her constructive advice. From the awful dates and bad faith friends to her mother’s well-meaning yet problematic attempts to trap her in childhood, Yuma struggles to find a sense of self-worth when everyone is telling her that her life is limited and she must conform to their stereotypical ideas of how “someone like” her should live.

Thanks to Mai and Toshiya, Yuma eventually gains the confidence to assert herself, but also the ability to accept that her mother’s actions, however misguided, came from a place of love tempered by regret and sadness she was unable to understand without engaging with her mother’s history. A beautifully empathetic exploration of a young woman’s gradual blossoming under the light of genuine connection, 37 Seconds is a unsubtle rebuke of a fiercely conformist society unwilling to accommodate difference but also a quiet hymn to defiance as its heroine learns to shake off the labels placed on her and claim her independence no matter what anyone else might have to say about it.

37 Seconds was screened as part of the 2019 BFI London Film Festival.

Festival trailer (English subtitles)

March Comes in Like a Lion (3月のライオン, Keishi Ohtomo, 2017)

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march comes in like a lion posterShogi seems to have entered the spotlight of late. Not only is there a new teenage challenger hitting the headlines in Japan, but 2017 has even seen two tentpole Japanese pictures dedicated to the cerebral sport. Following the real life biopic Satoshi: A Move for Tomorrow, March Comes in Like a Lion (3月のライオン, Sangatsu no Lion) adapts the popular manga by Chica Umino in which an orphaned boy attempts to block out his emotional pain through the taxing strategising becoming a top player entails. Shogi, however, turns out to be a dangerous addiction, ruining lives and hearts left, right and centre but, then again, it’s not so much “shogi” which causes problems but the emotional volatility its intense rigidity is often masking.

Rei Kiriyama (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lost his family at a young age when both parents and his little sister were tragically killed in a car accident. Taken in by a family friend, Rei takes up shogi (a game also apparently beloved by his late father) in the hope of being accepted in his new home. A few year’s later, Rei’s plan has worked too well. Better than either of his foster-siblings, Kyoko (Kasumi Arimura) and Ayumu, Rei has become his foster-father’s favourite child causing resentment and disconnection in the family home. Believing himself to be a disruptive influence among those he loves (even if he suspects they still do not love him), Rei removes himself by deciding to live independently, shunning all personal relationships and dedicating his life to the art of shogi.

Everything changes when Rei is taken for a night out by some senior colleagues and is encouraged to drink alcohol for the first time despite being underage. A kindly young woman who lives nearby finds Rei collapsed in the street and takes him home to sleep things off. The oldest of three sisters, Akari (Kana Kurashina) has a habit of picking up strays and determines to welcome the lonely high schooler into her happy home. Suddenly experiencing a positive familial environment, Rei’s views on interpersonal connection begin to shift but people are not like shogi and you can’t you can’t expect them to just fall into place like a well played tile. 

Like Satoshi, the real life subject of which is also echoed in March through the performance of an unrecognisable Shota Sometani who piles on the pounds to play the sickly yet intense shogi enthusiast and Rei supporter Harunobu Nikaido, March dares to suggest that shogi is not an altogether healthy obsession. Koda (Etsushi Toyokawa), Rei’s foster-father, is a shogi master who trained both his children to follow in his footsteps only to pull the rug from under them by ordering the pair to give up the game because they’ll never be as good as Rei. Thinking only of shogi, he thinks nothing of the effect this complete rejection will have on his family, seeming surprised when neither of his children want much more to do with him and have been unable to move forward with their own lives because of the crushing blow to their self confidence and emotional well being that he has dealt them.

Kyoko, Rei’s big sister figure, remains resentful and hurt, embarking on an unwise affair with a married shogi master (Hideaki Ito) who is also emotionally closed off to her because he too is using shogi as a kind of drug to numb the pain of having a wife in a longterm coma. Believing himself to be a disruptive influence who brings ruin to everything he touches, Rei has decided that shogi is his safe place in which he can do no harm to others whilst protecting himself through intense forethought. He is, however, very affected by the results of his victories and failures, feeling guilty about the negative effects of defeat on losing challengers whilst knowing that loss is a part of the game.

Drawing closer to the three Kawamoto sisters, Rei rediscovers the joy of connection but he’s slow to follow that thread to its natural conclusion. His shogi game struggles to progress precisely because of his rigid tunnel vision. Time and again he either fails to see or misreads his opponents, only belatedly coming to realise that strategy and psychology are inextricably linked. Yet in his quest to become more open, he eventually overplays his hand in failing to realise that his viewpoint is essentially self-centred – he learned shogi to fit in with the Kodas, now he’s learning warmth to be a Kawamoto but applying the rules of shogi to interpersonal relationships provokes only more hurt and shame sending Rei right back into the self imposed black hole he’d created for himself immersed in the superficial safety of the shogi world.

As Koda explains to Kyoko (somewhat insensitively) it’s not shogi which ruins lives, but the lack of confidence in oneself that it often exposes. Rei’s problem is less one of intellectual self belief than a continuing refusal to deal with the emotional trauma of losing his birth family followed by the lingering suspicion that he is a toxic presence to everyone he loves. Only in his final battle does the realisation that his relationships with his new found friends are a strength and not a weakness finally allow him to move forward, both personally and in terms of his game. Rei may have come in like a lion, all superficial roar and bluster, but he’s going out like a lamb – softer and happier but also stronger and more secure. Only now is he ready to face his greatest rival, with his various families waiting in his corner silently cheering him on as finally learns to accept that even in shogi one is never truly alone.

Released in two parts – 3月のライオン 前編 (Sangatsu no Lion Zenpen, March Comes in Like a Lion) / 3月のライオン 後編 (Sangatsu no Lion Kouhen, March Goes Out Like a Lamb).

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Rain of Light (光の雨, Banmei Takahashi, 2001)

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In the closing voice over of Banmei Takahashi’s Rain of Light (光の雨, Hikari no Ame), the elderly narrator thanks us, the younger generation, for listening to this long, sad story. The death of the leftist movement in Japan has never been a subject far from Japanese screens whether from contemporary laments for a perceived failure as the still young protestors swapped revolution for the rat race or a more recent and rigorous desire to examine why it all ended in such a dark place. Rain of Light is an attempt to look at the Asama-Sanso Incident through the eyes of the youth of today and by implication ask a few hard questions about the nature of revolution and social change and if either of those two things have any place in the Japan these young people now live in. Takahashi reframes the tale as docudrama in which his young actors and actresses, along with their increasingly conflicted director, attempt to solve these problems through recreation and role play, bridging the gap between the generations with a warning from those who dreamed of a better world that was never to be.

After beginning with a voice-over and archive footage of the original protests beginning in the ‘60s, Takahashi introduces us to the main thrust of the conceit as veteran TV commercial director Tarumi (Ren Osugi) announces his intention to make a film about the Asama-Sanso Incident and hires indie film director Anan (Masato Hagiwara) as an AD who will also film behind the scenes footage. From here on in we swap between the various levels of the film as we meet the young men and women who will inhabit the roles of the student radicals of 40 years before and then witness the tragic events which befell them eventually culminating in the famous siege which became Japan’s first live broadcast news event gathering a record number of viewers across its ten hour duration.

This is a sad story and a difficult one to watch. As the student movement dwindled in the early 1970s, factionalism was rife and the scene chaotic. Two different factions merged to become known as the United Red Army and retreated to a secret mountain camp where they would train for the coming revolution, believing that only armed insurrection could destroy the old order and allow them to build the bright new socialist future for which they were fighting. However, in the extreme paranoia surrounding the underground movement, there had already been two murders of suspected traitors and suspicion was everywhere. Led by Kurashige (Taro Yamamoto) and Uesugi (Nae Yuki) the mountain lodge quickly becomes a place of fear and rigidity as dogmatic maoist slogans take on near religious significance. Pushing the “soldiers” through the process of continuous “self criticism”, the group places personal revolution as a paramount necessity for social change. Using the system to ease personal grudges or clear the political air, Kurashige and Uesugi bring about the deaths of several cadre members through beatings, exposure, or starvation before resorting to bare faced murder all in the name of “reform”.

Less interested in simply reviewing events, Takahashi’s treatment attempts to speak directly to the young people of today who, at least according to the video interviews conducted by Anan, know little of this traumatic era which presumably formed the backdrop to their parents’ lives. As time moves on it transpires that Tarumi has a much more personal connection to the material than he’d previously been able to admit and one which eventually sees him attempt to absent himself from the film’s completion. In the absence of their director, the cast take on the attributes of their characters in trying to understand his actions. Beginning to self criticise themselves, the actors attempt to find the fault that has driven their leader away despite the fact that his reasoning is entirely personal.

The young discuss the various merits of change and revolution but find their forebears hard to grasp. It is, indeed, impossible and all too possible to understand how this happened. Young men and women who wanted to change the world found their ideals misused, driven half mad by a kind of quasi-religious cultism which demanded nothing less than total commitment the rules of which were entirely decided by a deluded madman terrified of losing his own grip on power. Though some of the performers come to sympathise with their roles, this era of heavily politicised thought and activism is so entirely alien to them as to seem arcane.

Takahashi delineates each of the various media through differing camera effects and aspect ratios from the mid-range digital of the film within the film to the low grade video of the direct to camera “behind the scenes” footage. The film is itself the bridge which the director claims he wants to make yet eventually backs away from as his own painful past becomes the subject he does not want to address. Anan, the AD, pleads with the director to deliver his message to the young. The old, he says, talk about the past like it’s yesterday but refuse offer anything of real substance to those who have come after them. Tarumi does indeed tell his story in all of its pain and sadness, stopping to remind us, as the troupe of actors gleefully start throwing snowballs around, that this was a children’s revolution begun by young men and women who wanted nothing other than to build a better world. So what of the youth of today? Is such idealism still present, and if it is could it ever be as frustrated and misused as the unhappy revolutionaries of the post ’68 generation? The answer seems to be no, but then nothing came of the grand gestures and political posturing of 40 years ago, perhaps the genial, everyday goodness of the youth of today will have more luck.

 

A Stranger of Mine (運命じゃない人, Kenji Uchida, 2005)

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stranger of mineSometimes life throws you a pretty crazy night but unbeknownst to you the whole world has gone crazy too. For the disparate group of people at the centre of Kenji Uchida’s A Stranger of Mine (運命じゃない人, Unmei Janai Hito) , this proves to be more than usually true. A cute romantic encounter may end up going in a less than cinematic direction while ex-girlfriends, detectives and even the yakuza all conspire to frustrate the lovelorn dreams of a nice guy businessman who never even realises the total chaos which is ensuing all around him.

The film begins with a sad scene of a woman, Maki, carrying large bags and forlornly dropping a key through a letter box. She pawns what looks like an engagement ring and thinks about what to do next. Whilst sitting alone in a restaurant, a man asks her to join him and she is overjoyed to find some company. The man is Kanda, a small time detective and childhood friend of businessman Miyata who is also broken hearted as his girlfriend has left him. The girlfriend, “Ayumi”, is not all she seems and is already mixed up with yakuza boss Asai. Mix in a MacGuffin of some missing money and one ordinary night among millions just got very complicated indeed!

Uchida starts out with a fairly standard indie rom-com approach as the two brokenhearted jilted lovers Maki and Miyata are brought together by Kanda’s machinations but just as we think we’re about to head into some kind of Before Sunset scenario our perspective shifts and we find out just why it is that Kanda seems to be acting so manically. In fact, he’s been looking out for his friend all along but it’s getting kind of complicated at his end and the one thing he 100% does not want is for the rather innocent Miyata to figure out that he’s at the centre of dangerous mob caper because his ex-girlfriend, whom he still think is an angel, is really not the innocent flower he thought she was.

Just another night in the city, the point of view shifts around these five characters whose lives intersect like cogs turning some giant, unseen machine. We’re shown one set of events only to have our understanding of them undercut by seeing them again from another angle. Everything is a coincidence, or maybe nothing is, but each of these five characters wade into each other’s story leaving a drama filled wake with only poor Miyata seemingly oblivious to what’s really going on.

A Stranger of Mine plays like an extremely complex farce in which fate conspires to have some fun with five ordinary people and Uchida mines the situation for all the (sometimes dark) humour it can offer. Loosely split into three sections divided by title cards bearing the names of the characters, the film takes inspiration from classic Hollywood screwball comedies and film noir whilst adding a more modern, non-linear approach as Uchida plays and replays his scenes to make us see that things are not always the way they look at first glance.

While obviously a low budget, independent effort, A Stranger of Mine offers surprisingly high production values and boasts excellent performances from its tightly composed cast. The script is fiendishly complicated and exacting yet Uchida pulls it off with a keenly observed eye. Though improbable, the events are never implausible and play out with a kind of off beat inevitability that further underlines the film’s mildly ironic, comic tone. Gleefully playful, A Stranger of Mine may appear a little slight on the surface, but just as its multi-layered narrative suggests, the perspective only deepens on a closer look.

Unsubtitled trailer:

Our Family (ぼくたちの家族, Yuya Ishii, 2014)

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Our FamilyYuya Ishii’s early work generally took the form of quirky social comedies, but underlying them all was that classic bastion of Japanese cinema, the family drama. If Ishii was in some senses subverting this iconic genre in his youthful exuberance, recent efforts have seen him come around to a more conventional take on the form which is often thought to symbolise his nation’s cinema. In Our Family Ishii is making specific reference to the familial relations of a father and two sons who orbit around the mother but also hints at wider concerns in a state of the nation address as regards the contemporary Japanese family.

Reiko (Mieko Harada) is an ordinary Japanese housewife in late middle age with a husband still working and two grown up children. She’s been worrying lately that she seems to forget things and she also has periodic trances almost like someone pressed the paused button. This all comes to a head when she and her husband Katsuaki attend a family dinner with their in-laws to celebrate the news that their eldest son, Kousuke (Satoshi Tsumabuki), and his wife are expecting their first child. Having behaved quite strangely all night long, Reiko finally ends by repeatedly addressing her daughter in law by the wrong name and muddling up details about the baby. Reiko’s still young but the natural assumption is perhaps that she’s slipping into senility, dementia or possibly even Alzheimer’s but a visit to the doctor turns up something that no one was expecting as they’re eventually made to understand that Reiko may only have a week left to live.

This devastating news of course sends shock waves through each member of the family and not least Kousuke who’s just learned he’s about to become a father. One of the things Reiko was most distressed about was that she’d wake up one day and her family would have fallen apart. It seems she grew up in an unhappy home and was determined not to replicate the experience for her children. Perhaps she did have cause to worry as there were definite cracks in the foundation of this household even before Reiko’s illness in that youngest son Shunpei (Sosuke Ikematsu) seems to have had a strained relationship with both his father and his older brother. In contrast to the other two men, Shunpei, still a student, is much more laid back and easy going though his father perhaps thinks him feckless and irresponsible. He meets his mother sometimes and she lends him money behind the father’s back but they talk more like friends than a mother and son.

Perhaps this division between the men in her life has been playing on Reiko’s mind but there are other problems too. Part of the bubble generation, Reiko and Katsuaki have been living well beyond their means for years and have amassed considerable personal debt. In fact, Katsuaki remortgaged the house a while back and made Kousuke a guarantor on their loan. Their best option would be to file for bankruptcy but doing that would leave Kosuke liable for the return of the mortgage so Katsuaki is reluctant to pursue that option. Now that Reiko’s in hospital money is at the forefront of everyone’s mind as they contemplate paying not only astronomical medical fees but potentially also paying for a funeral too.

This financial strain spills over into Kousuke’s new family as, when talking to his wife about needing to help out his parents, Kousuke discovers that Miyuki is just about as unsupportive as one could be. She brands Kousuke’s parents as irresponsible dreamers still living in the bubble era and suggests their predicament is both their own fault and their responsibility as, at their age, they should have been saving money for just these kinds of situations. Scornfully she insists that she doesn’t want to be “that kind of parent” and retires to bed in outrage. Having also refused to even accompany Kosuke to visit his mother in hospital (seeming to miss the point that he might be looking for her support rather than asking for appearance’s sake), poor Kousuke is left all alone trying to deal with the impending birth of his child and death of his mother all in a few short weeks.

The crisis does, at least, bring the three men a little closer together as it requires a kind of unilateral action that pushes previous resentments and ill feeling into the background. Reiko’s condition also means that she says some things that she would never have revealed directly to her family which both hint at some of her suffering over the last thirty years but also the deep love she has for her them. Katsuaki is revealed as a fairly ineffectual man who cares deeply but is blindsided by his wife’s condition and unable to face the facts leaving the bulk of responsibility to his oldest son. This kind of family abnegation is anathema in Japan – one would never want to be a burden to one’s children but Katsuaki is now both financially and morally dependent on Kousuke. Kousuke himself is not quite mature enough for this level of responsibility despite his impending fatherhood and his younger brother Shunpei may appear indifferent to everything but is merely putting a brave face on things though he may be the most dependable (and emotionally intelligent) of the three.

By the end, there is a glimmer of hope. The family can be repaired if you’re willing to work at it which means being willing to face the problems together and without any secrecy. Everyone, including the older generation, has in some senses “grown up”, facing the future together having accepted themselves and each other for who they are. Like applying a touch of kintsugi, their glittering wounds have only made them stronger and made each refocus on what’s really important. Neatly moving into a more dramatic arena, Ishii proves he’s still among Japan’s most promising young directors able to marry an idiosyncratic indie spirit with a more mainstream mentality.

The Hong Kong DVD/blu-ray release of Our Family includes English Subtitles!

Unsubtitled trailer: