Tag: Yushin Shinohara

Back To That Day (幕が下りたら会いましょう, Seira Maeda, 2021)

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A young woman facing a life crisis is forced to reevaluate her relationships with art, friends, and family after learning that her estranged younger sister has suddenly passed away in Seira Maeda’s indie drama, Back to that Day (幕が下りたら会いましょう, Maku ga Oritara Aimasho). Facing a patriarchal society, the young women at the film’s centre wonder if it’s better to chase your dreams even if they won’t come true or contend with the unfair demands of contemporary salaryman culture in the hope of achieving conventional success and a comfortable life. 

At around thirty, Manami (Rena Matsui) is beginning to lose patience with herself feeling that she’s achieved little in her career as a theatre director in the last 10 years while continuing to work part time at her mother’s hair salon. Her younger sister, Nao (Miwako Kakei), left abruptly for the city some time previously and the pair have hardly spoken since partly as we discover because of a high school falling out that continues to play on Masami’s mind in undermining her sense of confidence in her art. 

The two women have in many ways chosen different paths, Nao striking out by heading to the city and getting a regular office job and Manami staying at home trying to make it work in theatre but finding herself treading water. On the night that Nao dies, the sisters mirror each other each black out drunk collapsed in the street but only one of them is alone which in the end perhaps makes all the difference. Out to dinner with members of her theatre troupe celebrating an engagement, Manami has far too much to drink, much more than than anyone else or than is really appropriate becoming embarrassing in her belligerence as she lays into even her closest friends while others wonder why they bother with the troupe at all now that most of them are ageing out of their carefree days, have full-time paying jobs and growing familial responsibilities to take of. 

Nao, meanwhile as we discover, was pressured into drinking more than was wise by her boss at a semi-compulsory work do, an all too common form of power play in the contemporary working culture. Carrying her own share of guilt, Manami is alerted to this hidden source of her sister’s suffering by one of Nao’s colleagues, Mihashi (Manami Enosawa), who alone attended the funeral. Facing the same continued harassment, Mihashi is determined to confront her boss with the help of Niiyama (Kenta Kiguchi), an activist working on behalf of employees experiencing workplace bullying, but is later blamed herself with the implication that Nao drank on her behalf while she perhaps should have stayed to make sure she was alright before leaving for the last train. Her colleagues insist that Nao seemed cheerful and engaged with the party, while Manami and her actress friend Sanae (Nanami Hidaka) wonder if she wasn’t just playing the part, that in feeling disconnected from her family she wanted to feel accepted by those around her. 

In an unexpected turn of events, however, Manami decides to not to take Nao’s employer to task or attempt to change a dangerous and outdated workplace culture but to try and make peace with difficult relationship they had through restaging the high school play that set them apart which as it turns out was actually written by Nao but for which Manami had taken credit. Along the way she’s led towards a more commercial path by the duplicitous Niiyama who turns out to be a bit of a sleaze and not much better than those he claimed to be challenging. What she discovers is that restaging Nao’s play may not be the best way to honour her, gradually working through her grief and guilt by writing an original piece inspired by their relationship while reconsidering herself and her life up to that point. Of course, in one sense, she reduces Nao to a plot device in the mere motivation for her own creative rejuvenation while partially letting herself off the hook in discovering a family secret that explains a lot about her difficult relationship with her mother but does at least allow her come to terms with her sister’s death in letting her burn out bright just as in the alternate ending she’d crafted for Anna Karenina as a woman driven to extremes by the strictures of her society. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Midnight Maiden War (真夜中乙女戦争, Ken Ninomiya, 2022)

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An apathetic college student is pulled between nihilistic destruction and the desire for life in Ken Ninomiya’s adaptation of the novel by F, Midnight Maiden War (真夜中乙女戦争, Mayonaka Otome Senso). “Do those who struggle for life deserve to be defeated as evil?” is a question that is put to him while he asks himself if there’s something wrong in his yearning for a “boring”, conventional existence with a good job, house in the suburbs and people to share it. Then again as the forces of darkness point out, those who long for normality usually cannot attain it which only fuels their sense of resentment towards a “rotten” society. 

The unnamed protagonist (Ren Nagase) has come to Tokyo from Kobe to attend university and as his family are not wealthy is supposed to be studying for a scholarship exam while supporting himself with part-time jobs. Only as he’s abruptly let go from his side gig, he finds himself unfulfilled by his studies and wondering what the point is in wasting his youth just to lead a dull life of drudgery. In an intense act of self-sabotage which later goes viral, he tells his English professor (Makiko Watanabe) to her face that her classes are pointless while calculating exactly how much they cost per hour which turns out to be the equivalent to three hours of labour for his mother, the price of a new text book, or three months’ Netflix subscription which oddly becomes a kind of currency benchmark. He can’t see that anything he’s learning will be of much use to him in the further course of his life when the only prize is conventionality even if that conventionality might also provide basic comfort. 

After joining a mysterious “hide and seek” club and becoming distracted by a series of minor bombings of public bins on campus, the hero is pulled between a woman only known as “Sempai” (Elaiza Ikeda), and a man only known as “The Man in the Black Suit” (Tasuku Emoto) who sell him conflicting visions of hope and darkness. While Sempai thinks it’s wrong to belittle those who want to live their lives and are genuinely content with the conventional, The Man in the Black Suit quite literally wants to burn it all to the ground. What begins as an awkward friendship between two awkward men, soon develops into a cult-like organisation of, as the hero puts it, “social outcasts”, drawn to the Man in the Black Suit’s desire to destroy the rotten society which has rejected them through blowing up Tokyo on Christmas Day. 

Positing Tokyo Tower as the “root of unhappiness”, the hero claims he wants only to destroy, and most particularly himself along with everything else. Experiencing extreme ennui, he struggles to find meaning in his life yet is also conflicted in the breadth of the The Man in Black’s goals being fairly indifferent to the existence of others and unconvinced that those merely complicit in the system should also be targets of his social revenge. If not quite dragged towards the light, he realises that he must kill the nihilist within himself and in a sense be reborn, as the Man in Black puts it, as the god of a new world. “You’re alive, that’s good enough for me” Sempai echoes as the hero does at least in a sense embrace life even amid so much destruction. 

Ken Ninomiya has become closely identified with a singular style heavily inspired by music video and often taking place in Tokyo clubland. Midnight Maiden War is in many ways a much more conventional film mimicking the aesthetic of other similarly themed manga and light novel adaptations featuring only one real party scene and no extended musical sequences while routing itself in a more recognisably ordinary reality albeit one secretly ruled by a lonely tech genius. It does however feature his characteristic neon-leaning colour palate, focus pulls, and striking composition such as the revolving upside down shot which opens the film and hints at the unnamed protagonist’s sense of dislocation. Quite literally a tale of darkness and light, the film finds its dejected hero struggling to find meaning in a stultifying existence but perhaps finally discovering what it is to live if only at the end of the world. 

The Midnight Maiden War screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

It’s a Summer Film! (サマーフィルムにのって, Soshi Matsumoto, 2020)

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“Movies connect the present with the past through the big screen” according to the jidaigeki-obsessed heroine of Soshi Matsumoto’s charming sci-fi-inflected teen movie It’s a Summer Film! (サマーフィルムにのって, Summer Film ni Notte). True to its title, Matsumoto’s whimsical drama very much belongs to the grand tradition of high school summer movies as its youthful heroines contemplate eternity, romantic heartbreak, and artistic fulfilment while secretly plotting to best their vacuous rival by filming their very own teen samurai movie ready in time for the all-important school cultural festival. 

Aspiring director Barefoot (Marika Ito) is completely obsessed with classic samurai movies, arguing with her similarly devoted friends about who is hotter Shintaro Katsu or Raizo Ichikawa. She is a key member of the school movie making club, but intensely resentful of star player Karin (Mahiru Coda) who won the tender to make the film for this year’s cultural festival with a sappy teen romance which mostly seems to involve repeated scenes of the central couple loudly declaring their love for each other. Barefoot thinks a film should convey love without words and has written a script for a teen samurai movie in which adversaries become too emotionally invested in each other to engage in the expected final confrontation. All she’s lacking is a star and after spotting a handsome guy apparently as moved by a local rep screening as she is decides she’s found her man. What she doesn’t know is that Rintaro (Daichi Kaneko) is a secret time traveller from a future in which she has become a renowned master filmmaker but film itself sadly no longer exists. 

Being from the future and all explains Rintaro’s reluctance to star in the film, dropping accidental hints that he’s from another place as in his amusement that humans still staff removal companies and total mystification by the word “Netflix”. Yet he too is completely obsessed with classic jidaigeki from the heyday of the genre which had largely gone out of fashion by the early 1980s. As many point out, Barefoot’s hobby is slightly unusual, though she learned her love of chanbara from her grandma, receiving messages from the past she hoped to pass on to the future. Gathering most of the other rejected, outsider teens from a boy who looks about 40 to a pair of baseball nerds who can correctly guess the player from the sound of a ball hitting a glove and a bleach blond biker, she assembles a team to make her movie dreams come true as if to prove there’s something more out there than the, as she sees it, vacuous high school rom-coms favoured by the likes of Karin. 

Among the series of lessons she finally learns is that Karin need not be an adversary but could be a friend if only she look beyond her snootiness and resentment of the popular crowd even if Karin’s all pink, needlessly extravagant and egotistically branded crew shirts don’t do much to dispel Barefoot’s perception of her as entitled and self-obsessed. Another lesson she learns is that she’s not as disinterested in romance as she thought she was, though falling for Rintaro leaves her with a secondary dilemma realising that he’ll eventually have to return to his own times while also contemplating what the point of the future even is if they don’t have movies there. What she’s going to do with the rest of her life if the art of cinema is already obsolete? 

With some ironic help from Karin, what she realises is that even if something is destroyed it doesn’t disappear, films live on in the memories of those who saw them who can then take their memories with them into the future. Where her first draft had ended with an emotional anti-climax that saw her heroes too emotionally involved to engage in conflict, she now realises that samurai movies are love stories too and that “killing is a confession of love” in a slightly worrying though not altogether inaccurate take on the homoerotic subtext of the chanbara. A charmingly whimsical coming-of-age tale filled with meta touches from the constant references to classic jidaigeki to the heroine’s sci-fi-obsessed sidekick who seems to have an unrequited crush on her best friend idly reading The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, It’s a Summer Film! more than lives up to its name in its cheerful serenity as the teenage old souls defiantly learn to claim their own space while connecting with each other as they contemplate love and transience in the eternal art of cinema. 

It’s a Summer Film streamed as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Original trailer (English subtitles)