New Beat of Japan
Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1998
Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl
This has been quite a year for Japan. An economy spiralling downward, a prime minister hounded out of office, and the lingering trauma of the Tokyo subway gas attacks have all contributed to a sense of quiet desperation. And yet this adversity seems to have inspired an impressive and completely unexpected renaissance in Japanese cinema.
Two years ago, when we first decided that Japan would be our choice for the national cinema program, the country had been producing little more than a handful of interesting films every year. The last notable “movement” of Japanese cinema—the films of, especially, Sogo Ishii, Kaizo Hayashi, Naoto Yamakawa and Shinji Soomai in the eighties—had fizzled out, its promise never really fulfilled. And the pattern of production set in that decade continued: isolated auteurs struggled to make a first film, without any institutions to help them nor interest in their success from the traditional big studios.
But several subtle changes in the production machinery transformed the film world. First, the power of television money finally began to be felt; its hungry need for product helped break open the financing game. It was through this window that Naomi Kawase’s Suzaku, the 1996 Camera d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, was produced by the companies WOWOW and Bitters End. The medium also allowed certain personalities—most importantly Takeshi Kitano and Shinji Iwai—to use their television celebrity status to make independent films.
Another small but important step saw the Pia Film Festival begin an independent fund to finance their prize-winning filmmakers. This program created two of the most interesting of the New Beat filmmakers, Ryosuke Hashiguchi (Like Grains of Sand) and Shinobu Yaguchi (Down the Drain). It also signalled a certaln collegiality—as opposed to the mavericks of the eighties—in this new generation. Many of the filmmakers in this series will appear as actors or act as producers in films made by others; and many of the filmmakers are close friends.
All of these changes created a climate for stronger domestic production, but I doubt whether it all could have happened so fast if Japanese film had not returned so forcefully to the world stage. Following Kawase’s Camera d’Or win in 1996 was Shoei Imamura’s Palme d’Or in 1997 and Takeshi Kitano’s Venice Golden Lion for Fireworks. Commercially, Miramax’s release of Shall We Dance? was the most successful Japanese film in the USA for decades; the recent simultaneous release of Fireworks by Milestone and Sonatine by Miramax’s Rolling Thunder label also generated huge interest in Japanese film.
I must also mention here the extraordinary work done by James Quandt of Cinematheque Ontario, and his colleagues in other organizations, who have tirelessly promoted Japanese cinema and have been instrumental in discovering many of the directors featured in this program. Their work has given a context for and understanding of these films that all the prizes and splashy distribution ads may have temporarily shaded.
In this extremely diverse collection, the most striking shared concern for these filmmakers is an obsessive interest in the past. For Hirozaku Kore-Eda and Koji Hagiuda this becomes a highly aestheticized quest for lost memory; in comedies like Gen Yamakawa’s Ping Pong Bath Station and Koki Mitani’s Welcome Back Mr. McDonald, nostalgia tinged with a hint of bitterness.
The problems facing Japan now are played out strongly in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure and Testsuya Nakashima’s Beautiful Sunday. They both use metaphors—the first an irresistible serial killer, the second an apartment building full of lonely souls—to address a gnawing sense of spiritual emptiness. This desperation is made visceral in Shinya Tsukamoto’s Bullet Ballet, Saito’s Sunday Drive and Sabu’s Unlucky Monkey, as frustrated individuals seek a violent way out of society’s depressing traps.
A fascination with genre also connects these films. Many of the filmmakers, especially Sabu and Tsukamoto, have cited the films of Kinji Fukusaku as major influences on them. His daring transformation of the yakuza film in the early seventies (Battles Without Honor and Humanity) connects his vision closely to this new generation of genre experiments. As such, the only “old” film presented as part of this programme is his seminal Battles.
Also of note is an intelligent and challenging appropriation of ideas from the history of Japanese cinema. Films like Kiyoshi Kumakiri’s Kichiku and Katsuhito Ishii’s Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl look longingly at two campy classics, respectively Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of Angels and Fukusaku’s earlier Black Lizard, and yet do so without a hint of po-mo irony.
Because of space limitations, not every film that influenced this movement has been included but, still, New Beat of Japan is a fairly accurate picture of the depth and breadth of work being produced in this most extraordinary country.
—Noah Cowan
Many people and institutions have been instrumental in the creation and execution of this programme. Kiyo Joo, Hiromi Aihara, Jacinta Hin, Linda Hoaglund, James Quandt and Toshiko Aidlman have been especially helpful. I also need to single out the extraordinary support and generosity of longtime friends of this Festival, Fran and Kaz Kuzul. From the Japan Foundation, Koto Sato especially, Marie Suzuki and Akiko Machimura have worked tirelessly for this programme. From the companies involved in this programme, I would like to thank Makoto Kakurai and Shozo Ichiyama (Shochiku), Wouter Barendrecht and Helen Loveridge (Fortissimo), Yumiko Takahashi (Daiel), Haruyo Moriyoshi (Tokuma), Takenori Sento and Yuki Sadal (Bitters End), Shiho Sato (TV Man Union), Keiko Araki (Pia Film Festival), Masayuki Mori (Office Kitano), Hengameh Panahi (Celluloid Drearns) and Kayo Yoshida (Asmik Ace Entertainment).
After Life
Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Japan, 1998
118 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: TV Man Union Inc./Engine Films Inc.
Executive Producer: Yutaka Shogenobu
Producer: Shiho Sato, Masayuki Akieda
Screenplay: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Cinematographer: Yutaka Yamazaki, Masayoshi Sukita
Editor: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Production Designer: Toshihiro Isomi, Hideo Gunji
Sound: Osamu Takizawa
Music: Yashurio Kasamatsu
Principal Cost: Erika Oda, Susuma Terajima, Sadawo Abe, Natsuo Ishida, Kazuko Shirakawa
Production: TV Man Union Inc.
Sureiy one of the most auspicious debuts in recent memory, Maboroshi still resonates as a powerful paean to the power of unexplained loss and the grief that follows in the wake of suicide. But ever more extraordinary was the delicate and profound treatment of the film’s guiding idea: the awesome potency of memory, a force equally capable of destruction and redemption.
This same fundamental theme underpins Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s second feature, After Life, even though the context and scope of this new film is utterly different. Here he uses the idea of memory to craft an epic portrait of post-war Japanese society and debate the true nature of happiness, all set in a kind of limbo, between life and death. The result is overwhelming, a quiet storm of a film that shakes our understanding of life to its very core.
Kore-Eda’s Purgatory resembles a mist-enshrouded rural retreat. The dead register upon entry and are urged to sift through their memories in order to find one ultimate moment of joy. They have one week to do so. Quickly separated into one-on-one sessions with uniformed employees assigned to them, the dead begin discussing their lives, some with urgency, some with confusion. Each night, the staff gathers to discuss their cases, especially those “clients” in danger of never recovering a truly joyous memory
Kore-Eda’s background as a documentary filmmaker shines through in these sequences; the juggling of many different life stories, including the enigmatic histories of the staff interviewers, is handled with confident cross-cutting and a marvellously naturalistic style
Ultimately, when the interviews are over, the chosen moments—a first date, the smell of flowers, a last cigarette—are painstakingly recreated and filmed, creating the very personal heaven that each of the deceased will enter for all eternity.
Not only is this a beautiful, spiritually rich idea, but it is handled in a poignant cinematic fashion. The artificiality of the sets and players is foregrounded, as the scenes are constructed before the deceased’s very eyes; yet they become almost giddy with joy as they see the proceedings unfold.
So, ultimately, Kore-Eda completes the circle: cinema too is a form of memory, with strong powers of redemption and transcendence. Perhaps After Life itself is his offering of proof.
—Noah Cowan
Bullet Ballet
Shinya Tsukamoto
JAPAN, 1998
90 minutes Black and White/35mm
Production Company: Kaijyu Theater Co., Ltd.
Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto
Cinematographer: Shinya Tsukamoto
Editor: Shinya Tsukamoto
Music: Chu Ishikawa
Principal Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto, Kirina Mano, Tatsuya Nakamura, Takahiro Murase, Kyoka Suzuki, Hisashi Igawa
Production: Kaijyu Theater Co., Ltd.
A masterpiece of contemporary urban pain and desperation, Bullet Ballet represents a major leap forward for Festival discovery Shinya Tsukamoto.
The film seeks nothing less than to explain the changes wrought in Japanese society over the last decade; for Tsukamoto, the nation’s official collectivist work ideology, embodied by the ever-present “salary-man,” has dissolved in the unbearable alienation and loneliness of its citizens. The result is violent, philosophically confrontational and deeply personal.
Goda—played by Tsukamoto with an astonishing visceral anguish—was a classic Tokyo yuppie. But his bustling life as a TV producer changed forever when his fiancée informed him that she was cancelling their wedding and soon after shot herself. Baffled in utter grief about her motives and how she obtained a weapon of such great destruction, he tries to re-engage in the world. He meets a punky girl named Chisato near Shibuya train station, who lures him into an alley. But a group of young people—her friends—attack and humiliate him in brutal fashion. They also try to extort money out of him by seizing his identification. These kids aren’t yakuza and aren’t even professional criminals; they are a recent development of Japanese society: well-educated, middle-class kids looking for a few kicks before they go to university.
He seeks revenge, at first with ham-fisted recklessness, then with a gun, which he literally stumbles upon. A brutal gangland fight sets the stage for Goda to clean this vermin from his streets and save Chisato from their clutches. But things don’t work out exactly as planned.
Shot in hand-held black and white, the look of the film differs radically from Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist, an intense and bloody boxing “love” story, and his classic cyberpunk Tetsuo films, about the dystopic synthesis of man and machine. In Bullet Ballet, the camera is even more intimately involved in the proceedings than the characters are themselves. The effect is breath-taking and frightening, leaving one with the disquieting feeling that this could well be a premonition of troubled times to come everywhere.
—Noah Cowan
Beautiful Sunday
Tetsuya Nakashima
JAPAN, 1998
93 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: FAT Inc.
Producer: Motohiro Hatanaka, Haruo Takarada
Screenplay: Tetsuya Nakashima
Cinematographer: Shoichi Atoh
Editor: Chiaki Toyama
Production Designer: Tsuneo Kantake
Sound: Yasuo Komori
Music: Yoko Kanno
Principal Cast: Masatoshi Nagase, Momoko Bitoh, Kumiko Nakamura, Noriko Nagi, Kyoko Endoh
Production: FAT Inc.
Tetsuya Nakashima’s second film is a beautifully crafted and uplifting story, featuring the residents of one apartment building from dawn until dusk on a most unusual Sunday. By turns comic and wistful, he ends up saying much about the alienation of modern city life in a precise and entertain- ing fashion.
On the first floor, a young couple is woken up by inspectors responding to a noise complaint. The fractures in their relationship are clear but they decide to find a place to play catch instead of having a serious talk.
On the second floor, a half-American, half-Japanese girl sits glued to her desk, determined to earn the respect of her peers through the highest grades ever.
On the third floor, an extraordinary old lady screams in an amazingly loud voice, as she does every day as she prepares her tea.
The landlady furiously paints self-portraits in a run-down apartment she has never leased.
As we trace their daily interactions, we sense that a pivotal change is in the air, which comes with the old woman’s ascent to the roof, where she announces that she is a visitor from another planet and will be going home that night.
Each story elegantly conveys the anxiety of modern life but none are heavy-handed.
Nakashima’s camera—always intriguingly placed and perfectly composed—adds a kind of sparkling levity to the proceedings. So it is with a broad smile on her face and a little chuckle that the old woman explains her daily vocal exhortations: “I scream every day so that people will know I am still alive. If they don’t hear me screaming, then they will know I am dead or something happened to me.”
—Noah Cowan
Rakuen | Paradise Sea
Koji Hagiuda
JAPAN, 1998
90 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Bitters End Inc./ Japan Satellite Broadcasting
Producer: Takenori Sento, Koji Kobayashi
Screenplay: Koji Hagiuda
Cinematographer: Masaki Tamura
Editor: Shuichi Kakesu
Production Designer: Hidefumi Hanatani
Sound: Nobuyuki Kikuchi
Music: Masamichi Shigeno
Principal Cast: Reiko Matsuo, Shinji Arano, Nobuyoshi Tanigawa, Fukuo Sudo, Miwako Kawai Production: Bitters End Inc.
The quiet, meditative beauty of Paradise Sea places director Koji Hagiuda firmly in the circle of an influential group of new filmmakers, which includes Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Maboroshi) and Naomi Kawase (Suzaku). With their emphasis on the past and the power of memory, and their slow, deliberate rhythms and elegant cinematography, this group has been a major force in the international festival scene, scooping up awards at every stop.
Koji was Assistant Director on the set of Suzaku—Camera d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997—and was credited by Kawase with having much influence on the film’s final shape. (The film is also produced by Bitters End, the company behind Suzaku.) Like other filmmakers in this group, he too is grounded in documentaries, even though he also worked closely with Kaizo Hayashi for many years; the influence of the maverick eighties filmmaker—at least of his more meditative films—is evident here as well.
Paradise Sea is set on a small island in the southern district of Kyushu. Old Man—he is never named—has lived his entire life there as a specialized craftsman of wooden boats. He now lives alone after the death of his wife. Suzue, his granddaughter, has dropped out of a city high school and come to stay with him indefinitely. As the film opens, a traditional dance troupe is packing up to leave, but its leader decides to stay on the island for undisclosed reasons. He soon joins the Old Man in his endeavour to build an unusually large boat, and becomes increasingly obsessed by the ancient, dying craft. Two others from the troupe stay on, trying to find him.
Each character is engaged in a search—for lost traditions, for a sense of self, for a place in the world. Daringly elliptical, this richly textured tale is enormously moving and thought-provoking. Its wistful sense of the recent past is also a key characteristic of the New Beat filmmakers in this programme.
—Noah Cowan
Ikinai
Hiroshi Shimizu
JAPAN, 1998
101 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Office Kitano
Producer: Masayuki Mori
Screenplay: Dankan
Cinematographer: Katsumi Yanagishima
Editor: Yoshinori Ota
Production Designer: Norihiro Isoda
Sound: Senji Horiuchi
Music: Maya
Principal Cast: Dankan, Nanako Okouchi, Toshinori Omi, Ippei Soda, Youichi Nukumizu, Great Gidayu, Hiroyuki Kishi
Production: Office Kitano
Aragaki, the leader of a three-day bus tour, is awaiting his final passenger at Naha Airport in Okinawa. At the last minute, a young woman named Mitsuki approaches him; she has come in place of her uncle, who had booked months before but is now unable to go. Little does she know that this is no ordinary bus tour. The other twelve members are heavily in debt and have plotted with Aragaki to make this a “suicide tour.” Their aim is to collect life insurance money for their families to pay off their debt.
Through a series of word games, visits to tourist sites, karaoke and other structured social interactions, the twelve men, Mitsuki and the three tour operators come to know each other’s plights and debate the merits of their course of action.
Hiroshi Shimizu’s first feature film is a thoughtful, complex exploration of human sadness and redemption, told with much gentle humour and a genuine love for his pathetic characters. It explores many grand themes of Japanese culture—the public expression of shame through suicide, game-playing as social glue, the personalization of socio-economic decline—with a deft touch and a light heart.
This film comes from Office Kitano, the production/distribution entity formed by Takeshi Kitano (Fireworks), the enormously talented and world-famous maverick of current Japanese cinema, and his staff. It is the first non-Kitano film they have created. Shimizu has been the great man’s assistant director for many years, and the film’s writer and star, Dankan, is one of Kitano’s comedy “Army” of apprentices. Yet the film is far removed from Kitano’s existentialist gangsters; it feels closer to his lesser-known A Scene at the Sea and, especially, the playful beach sequences of Sonatine.
“Ikinai” means “can’t or won't live.” According to the director’s statement, this might be a play on words with Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (“to live”), or Kaneto Shindo’s Ikitai (“I want to live”); or it could recall the marketing slogan for the blockbuster animated film Princess Mononoke, “Ikiro!” (“You must live!”).
Whatever the interpretation, Ikinai is a major accomplishment and marks a significant new talent on the international film scene.
—Noah Cowan
Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl
Katsuhito Ishii
JAPAN, 1998
108 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Tohokushinsha Film Corporation
Executive Producer: Hilo lizumi
Producer: Kazuto Takida
Screenplay: Katsuhito Ishii, based on the comic series by Minetaro Mochizuki Cinematographer: Hiroshi Machida
Editor: Yumiko Doi
Production Designer: Tomoyuki Maruo
Sound: Kohichi Mori
Principal Cast: Tadanobu Asano, Sie Kohinata, Ittoku Kishibe, Susumu Terashima, Kimie Shingyoji
Production: Tohokushinsha Film Corporation
“Screening the movie should almost be like reading a violent and funny manga.”—Katsuhito Ishii
Everything about Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl is exciting. Electrically paced, the film is bursting with visual ideas, colours and lots of campy fun. Director Ishii established himself at a young age as one of Japan’s premiere commercial filmmakers, and his innovative work in that field exhibits a fascination with a kind of “perverse chic”—an amalgam of unusual sex, speedy drugs, exquisite locations and clothing—in Japanese culture. One of his visual tropes in fact sees the characters all dressed in designer originals, in a style known as “hyper fashion gear”—to see is to believe!—except the leading man, who quick-changes through the clothes of super-hot designer Takeo Kikuchi.
With its crazed yakuza characters, homoeroticism and eye-popping look, Shark Skin Man’s nearest antecedent is probably Kinji Fukasaku’s Black Lizard, the Mishima-written gender-bending masterwork of 1968.
The film also features a sexy, winning performance from the poster boy of recent Japanese cinema, Tadanobu Asano. With credits like Maboroshi, Focus, Helpless and Labyrinth of Dreams, he is probably the most familiar Japanese face in the west since Toshiro Mifune’s glory days.
Here Asano plays a spoiled yakuza brat, running down the road in only his (Takeo Kikuchi) underwear. A young ingenue escaping from her sexually twisted and crazy uncle—the proprietor of a local hotel—sees him from her car window and promptly smashes into a carful of professional hit men. The young couple speeds away, pursued by the dazed killers and the bizarre Yamada, an automatonic nerd hired by the heroine’s uncle to bring her home. After a series of near-escapes and a respite with a flamboyant “dresser”—who gives them the monikers of the title—the pair are dragged back to the hotel for a most extraordinary climax.
—Noah Cowan
Sunday Drive
Hisashi Saito
JAPAN, 1998
86 minutes Colour/16mm
Production Company: Kaijyu Theater Co, Ltd
Producer: Shinya Tsukamoto
Screenplay: Hisashi Saito
Cinematographer: Isao Ishii
Editor: Kumi Okada
Sound: Yumiko Nakamura
Music: Shinichi Kanazawa
Principal Cast: Shinya Tsukamoto, Miako Dadano, Takumi Tanji, Makiko Ono, Takuji Suzuki
Production: Kaijyu Theater Co, Ltd
Hisashi Saito’s clearly defined style uses long takes and banal banter to implicate us in the actions of his characters, even if they are of the enigmatic, vaguely menacing sort. (His films have the subtle menace of the early scenes in Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers.) As a result, a plot heavy film transpires with almost none of the significant narrative scenes taking place on screen; those that do happen in a dreamy slowness of real time.
Okamura is a manager of a video shop. Yul is his helper. One day, a small (never fully explained) misunderstanding leads Okamura to kill Shinji, Yui’s boyfriend, and confess his love to her. They steal Shinji’s brother’s van and hit the road. The couple gradually comes together and Yul confesses that she too has feelings for Okamura. They soon encounter a little girl who joins them on their trip and they increasingly act like a traditional family. At least until Okamura’s cell phone rings...
The social nostalgia inherent in much of the New Beat films is given such an interesting spin here; suffocated by their dead-end jobs and lives—Okamura is bright but bored to tears; Yui is utterly passive—they try to artificially evoke a traditional family by running away. Also intriguing is his take on the couple-on-the-run film.
Sunday Drive is also connected with the rest of the New Beat by its star and executive producer, Shinya Tsukamoto. Saito co-wrote the script of Tsukamoto’s Tokyo Fist and shares with him the desire to find alternative ways of commenting on society’s problems. And, while he does not utilize Tsukamoto’s baroque cinematic constructions, they both have a healthy love of the perverse and blackly comic moment. Saito is clearly a filmmaker to watch.
—Noah Cowan
Ping Pong Bath Station
Gen Yamakawa
JAPAN, 1998
110 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Tokuma International /Daiei Co. Ltd.
Executive Producer: Yasuyoshi Tokuma, Hiroyuki Kato, Seiji Urushido, Shigeru Ohno, Kazuhiro Igarashi
Producer: Tetsuya Ikeda, Shoji Masui, Yoichi Arishige
Screenplay: Gen Yamakawa
Cinematographer: Tokusho Kikumura
Editor: Masahiro Ohnaga
Production Designer: Kouichi Kanekatsu
Sound: Kiyoshi Yoneyama
Music: Taro lwashiro
Principal Cast: Keiko Matsuzaka, Riho Makise, Keizo Kanie
Production: Daiei Co. Ltd.
The huge domestic and international success of Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? has spawned a wonderful new group of warm-hearted comedies. Not afraid of the melodramatic gesture, these films delight both in the specific foibles of Japanese society and universal themes of love, envy, prosperity and greed. Ping Pong Bath Station, from the same creative team (except Suo) who made Shall We Dance?, offers all this and more. The story of a housewife who “finds herself” by creating a ping-pong tournament at a hot spring inn, the film is full of very funny moments; but it also has some valuable lessons about the transformative power of happy memories and the strength and perseverance sometimes hidden in demure packages.
Our heroine is Sonoko Fujiki, an increasingly sad 42-year-old housewife—in a magical performance by legendary stage actress Keiko Matsuzaka—ignored by her workaholic husband and punky son. After calling an irresponsible talk radio host named Kanae for advice, she tacks a note on the family message board which reads: “I am leaving home. Sorry, Sonoko.”
On a madcap drive into the mountains, she encounters a group of innkeepers who complain about the declining number of visitors to the traditional “onsen.” These inns dot the mountains throughout Japan, providing a variety of volcanic mineral baths, gourmet cooking and an escape from the madness of the city. (In post-war Japan, the inns were the holiday choice of Japan’s emerging middle class until the joys of international travel supplanted them.)
Soon her car breaks down as well and they are picked up by Kanae who, it turns out, is the heiress to the “Horaiya” inn, a place full of happy memories for Sonoko. She and her husband spent time there soon after their marriage. Her fondest memories are of the long ping-pong rallies she shared with him, surrounded by other laughing couples.
After ridding herself of the self-doubt and guilt engendered by her departure from her family, she decides that she can win back her sense of self-worth and provide happiness for many people by recreating the ping-pong tournaments of old.
—Noah Cowan
Unlucky Monkey
Sabu
JAPAN, 1997
106 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Shochiku Dai-Ichi Kogyo
Production Producer: Hidemi Satani
Screenplay: Sabu
Cinematographer: Shuji Kuriyama
Production Designer: Hayato Ohba
Sound: Hiroshi Yamagata
Music Daisuke Okamoto
Principal Cast: Shinichi Tsutsumi, Hiroshi Shimizu, Akira Yamamoto, Ikko Suzuki
Production: Shochiku Dai-Ichi Kogyo
Nishida and Yamazaki are nervously about to rob a bank when another thief, dressed identically to them, comes running out with the loot. In the blink of an eye, Nishida and the robber are felled by a speeding automobile. A panicked Yamazaki grabs the money and flees through the narrow streets. Turning a corner at high speed, he accidentally stabs a young female hairdresser to death. As she dies in his arms, he realizes that this is the first time he has fallen in love.
Young Japan’s contradictory nostalgia for and impatience with traditional narrative forms is embodied in one-named director Sabu. An accomplished actor, he has created in the last few years a series of films which strip the action elements of the one-man-against-the-yakuza genre down to its bare bones. One snippet of macho dialogue in a moving car cuts to a delirious tracking shot of a back-alley chase, which cuts to a slow-motion shooting. The effect is mesmerizing. And, while his earlier work played out more like a tantalizing formal experiment, Unlucky Monkey shows Sabu’s full promise as a filmmaker. Audiences find his constantly surprising and riotously funny shifts in tone irresistible; his unique style has in fact made him an extremely hip international sensation and Toronto is long overdue for an introduction.
The plot synopsis above, by the way, takes account only of the film’s first five minutes. Our hero will soon encounter three blundering yakuza who have accidentally killed the head of a rival clan. While incompetently burying the man, they discover that Yamazaki has quite a fortune but is out of his mind with despair. They strike a deal: they get his money; he gets to die.
Like the other filmmakers in this series, Sabu has an ambivalent but clear-eyed view of his country and the quietly tumultuous changes it has experienced of late. This intelligence serves to make his dark humour all the more rich and cutting.
—Noah Cowan
Battles Without Honor and Humanity
Kinji Fukasaku
JAPAN, 1973
93 minutes Black and White/35mm
Screenplay: Kazuo Kasahara, based on an original story by Koichi liboshi Cinematographer: Sadaji Yoshida
Production Designer: Takatoshi Suzuki
Principal Cast: Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Tsenehiko Watase, Goro Ibuki, Eiko Nakamura
Although never placed in the pantheon beside Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi and Imamura, Kinji Fukasaku has exerted at least as strong an influence on this new generation of Japanese filmmakers (and many elsewhere, including John Woo and Quentin Tarantino). Although audiences may know him best for the sixties caper film Black Lizard, his reputation actually rests on the radical transformation he brought to the yakuza film. He single-handedly turned the genre into an examination of violence itself, with characters at best morally neutral and with the so-called “yakuza code of honour” replaced by animal brutality and betrayal. Wild camera movement only reinforces his street-level authenticity.
Battles Without Honor and Humanity—the first in a long series of similarly-themed films—is probably his best, and was a major box-office smash. It is extremely complex; the film spans twenty-five years, involves scores of characters and frequently dissolves in anarchic bloodbaths. It takes place in the ghettos of post-war Hiroshima—already a loaded metaphor; at its core is the story of Hirono, a violent but essentially decent guy, and his relationship with the unscrupulous, manipulative boss of the Yamamori group.
—Noah Cowan
Detective Riko
Satoshi Isaka
JAPAN, 1997
99 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company Asmik Ace Entertainment
Executive Producer: Masato Hara
Producer: Junji Akai, Masao Nagai
Screenplay: Rika Tanaka
Cinematographer: Tetsuro Sano
Editor: Nobuyuki Takahashi
Sound: Yoshitaka Imai
Music: Izumi Miyazaki, Hiroshi Fujiwara
Principal Cast: Ryoko Takizawa, Toshiya Nagasawa, Takeo Nakahara, Yumi Aso Production: Asmik Ace Entertainment
One of the characteristics of the new group of filmmakers emerging from Japan is their passionate interest in genre. In some cases, this involves subverting it from an “independent” position. But it can also mean reinventing traditional narratives from within existing production structures. Detective Riko was made within the media conglomerate of Asmik Ace Entertainment and the Kadokawa Shoten publishing house, but was directed by Satoshi Isaka, the acclaimed creator of Focus, a product of the independent scene. So Detective Riko is a fascinating cultural product. More importantly, it also happens to be an excellent police thriller, delivering the suspense and mystery audiences expect with intelligence and wit.
The film concerns a female detective, Murakami Riko of Jingumae Division. She is a single mother and tries—often unsuccessfully—to balance the demands of her job with the needs of Akihiko, her son by another detective who was shot on duty. The man in her life, Inspector Ando of heaquarters, is waiting out the last days of his marriage to a terminally ill crazy woman.
On a rare day off, she takes Akihiko to a park and meets a strange woman who tells Riko that her own son is in hospital. Summoned to work, Riko begins investigating the murder of a housewife moonlighting as a prostitute. The investigation leads to a man whose baby disappeared three years ago in an unsolved kidnapping. More peculiar murders follow and it is revealed that the woman in the park is in fact married to the father of the kidnapping victim. As she unravels the mystery of the abducted child, she grapples with the increasing alienation felt by her own son at her long absences.
As a character, Riko is closest to Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski—a tough, smart detective who, while very much a woman, conforms to no stereotype. Its honesty about her ambivalent love life, difficulties balancing job and motherhood and unusual strengths as a police officer are constantly touched upon. This kind of character is subversive in any context; in Japan it’s near on a revolution.
—Noah Cowan
Cure
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
JAPAN, 1997
115 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Daiei Co. Ltd.
Executive Producer: Hiroyuki Kato
Producer: Tsutomu Tsuchikawa, Atsuyuki Shimoda
Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Cinematographer. Tokusho Kikumura
Editor: Kan Suzuki
Production Designer: Tomoyuki Maruo
Music: Gary Ashiya
Principal Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tsuyoshi Ujiki, Anna Nakagawa, Masato Hagiwara Production: Daiei Co. Ltd.
This moody, atmospheric police thriller, with complex overtones of mind control, police brutality and copycat murder, comes from an influential veteran of Japanese filmmaking. Working almost entirely within conventional genres—yakuza flicks, broad comedies, policiers—for his entire career, Kiyoshi Kurosawa brings a knowing intelligence to his films that has had an impact on many younger filmmakers. His ability to stretch genre mandates (and the patience of those who finance such films) to accommodate profound philosophical ideas about contemporary society, as well as concerns more metaphysical, makes him a particularly pivotal figure in this programme. Sadly, this is the only film of his subtitled in English.
Detective Takabe—Koji Yakusho from Shohei Imamura’s The Eel and Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance?—is tracking a series of identical murders, committed under the same bizarre circumstances. Corpses are found, with a brutally slashed “X” through their chests; the killer remains near the scene of the crime, unable to recall the events that led to the killing. Nothing seems to connect the killings and Takabe is getting increasingly frustrated, a condition greatly enhanced by his wife’s worsening, unexplained mental disorientation. (Their story serves as a provocative counterpoint to the precise “thoughts” in the main story.)
Finally, investigators find a drifter named Mamiya—in an astonishingly seductive performance by newcomer Masato Hagiwara—obliquely connected to one of the murders. As he passes through police and forensic custody, a rash of “X” murders follow. While Takabe and his psychologist friend Sakuma immediately become aware that Mamiya has powerful hypnotic powers, it takes a twist-filled investigation before they determine what created such a monster.
The “whydunit” part of the story cannot be revealed—it is too fascinating and unsettling. Suffice to say that it builds a thought-provoking epilogue to Kurosawa’s central idea here, one much discussed by students of Hitler and cult behaviour: in a society stripped of all possible traditional guides—from religion to family to politics—the charismatic can exert an all-powerful hold on the minds of those left unanchored.
—Noah Cowan
Kichiku
Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
JAPAN, 1997
100 minutes Colour/16mm
Production Company: ONI Productions
Producer: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, Tomohiro Zaizen
Screenplay: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Cinematographer: Kiyoaki Hashimoto
Editor: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri
Principal Cast: Sumiko Mikami, Shunsuke Sawada, Shigeru Bokuda, Toshiyuki Sugihara
Production: ONI Productions
Muscle Influenza
Keiji Ichikawa, Ken Arima
JAPAN, 1997
11 minutes Colour/16mm
Chronicling the bloody demise of a student revolutionary cell of the seventies, young director Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s Kichiku will likely be remembered as the moment when eighties-style American splatter-gore took hold as an influence on Japanese cinema. Its last half-hour is little more than a catalogue of increasingly provocative and repulsive acts of sexually-tinged torture and execution. (This should serve as a warning for those audience members unaccustomed to such things.)
Yet to describe Kichiku with the language of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is to sell it very short. Kumakiri’s film is in many ways the most romantically nostalgic in the programme. The razor-sharp precision of the film’s Maoist dialogue, the fragmentary newsreel footage of the student riots of the seventies and its carefully considered tips to the wild, utterly lost counterculture that accompanied it are the work of a period obsessive. Its seamless intertwining of constant acrobatic sex, over-the-top violence, a mood of intense paranoia and leftist diatribe owes much to Koji Wakamatsu (especially his Ecstasy of the Angels), an overlooked genius of Japan’s “pink” (soft-core) film movement. Even its gut-splattering conclusion is best thought of as a kind of cinematic bacchanal, celebrating the discovery of a lost language of Japanese filmmaking and politics. (The Japanese title of the film translates loosely as Banquet of the Non-Humans.)
This madness is all witnessed by Fujiwara, a student radical released from prison at the film’s beginning. His cellmate, the leader of a revolutionary splinter group, has asked him to meet his girlfriend, who has temporarily taken over his leadership. They are a pathetic group, led by the shrill, evil Masami and her consort Yamane, a thuggish sex addict. But when the imprisoned leader, despairing for the movement, commits suicide, Masami loses her mind. Convinced he was denounced by a group member, she devotes herself entirely to revenge and punishment.
Muscle Influenza is a characteristically hip and amusing take from the Pia Organization on a “freelance” kidnapper who abducts and delivers women to organized crime groups.
—Noah Cowan
The Goofball
Junji Sakamoto
JAPAN, 1998
91 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Sedic International
Executive Producer: Masao Kimura, Yasuhiko Furusato
Producer: Yukiko Shi’i
Screenplay: Junji Sakamoto, Ryou Tamura
Cinematographer: Norimichi Kasamatsu
Editor: Toshihide Fukano
Production Designer: Mitsuo Harada
Sound: Jun’ichi Shima
Music: Takayuki Ino’u’e
Principal Cast: Kuroudo Maki, Kazuma Suzuki, Miki Sakajou, Ren Osugi
Production: Sedic International
Junji Sakamoto is best known for the obsessive, elliptically-told moral drama Tokarev, and his intense debut boxing film Knock Out. But he has recently turned to considerably more light-hearted work, focusing on society’s “losers” and their foibles. Although often in wide distribution, his offbeat comedies still manage to feel fresh, largely because of his unique, bitter- sweet perspective and fluid, exquisitely lit camera style.
We meet Hisashi as he gets fired from his job as a window washer for assaulting his boss. Trying to care for his unusually large dog, he gets into a brawl at the local supermarket—a place where he likes to shoplift—over the cost of his favourite dog food. There he meets a fellow shoplifter, an intriguing, somewhat sad, middle-aged woman named Chikako. Later, when he tries to abandon the dog in a local park, she approaches him and invites him home. There she tries to hire him as a private detective to locate her lost son, Masaru. At first he resists, then (hilariously) tries to obtain another job, and finally relents.
His search finds him requesting Masaru’s favourite song on the radio and cruising through seedy Shinjuku. Ultimately Masaru finds Hisashi and “adopts” the goofball, finding new and inventive ways to humiliate him. Eventually the two become (literally) partners in crime, leading to crazy adventures and their ultimate, dramatic arrest.
Although the film is dominated by Kuroudo Maki’s utterly charming and hysterically funny performance, The Goofball has a rather menacing undertone. Chikako is savagely beaten off-screen by her husband when Hisashi first meets her; it is never discussed, yet hangs as a guiding motivation for many of the characters’ behaviour. Also perverse is Masaru’s often odious yet curiously fraternal contempt for Hisashi, which speaks to a rather more cruel universe than one normally sees in Japanese cinema. These elements connect Sakamoto less to the other comedies in the New Beat program and more to the darker visions of Tsukamoto, Sabu and, ultimately, Fukasaku. It is a highly entertaining and surprisingly provocative effort.
—Noah Cowan
Welcome Back Mr. McDonald
Koki Mitani
JAPAN, 1997
103 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Fuji Television Network Inc./Toho Co. Ltd.
Executive Producer: Ko-ichi Murakami, Hideyuki Takai
Producer: Takashi Ishihara, Karjiro Sakuro
Screenplay: Koki Mitani
Cinematographer: Kenji Takama, Junichi Tozawa
Editor: Hirohide Abe
Production Designer: Tomia Ogawa
Sound: Tetsuo Segawa
Music: Takayuki Hattori
Principal Cast: Toshiaki Karasawa, Kyoka Suzuki, Masahiko Nishimura, Jun Inoue, Shunji Fujimura, Akira Fuse
Production: Fuji Television Network Inc.
This madcap comedy is an unabashed appropriation of classic American screwball farce, rendered with a fascinating Japanese sociological spin.
There are five minutes left before the start of a live radio play named “The Woman of Destiny,” a Harlequin-style melodrama. A prize-winning entry in a radio contest, written by retiring housewife Miyako, the play is about a fisherman’s wife in a small village. (Hers was in fact the only entry; the whole idea was a cheap way of filling radio time.) All is set, until the diva lead actress summons the stressed-out company-man producer. She would like some minor alterations to the play: her name from now on is Mary Jane, she is a career woman—perhaps a trial lawyer—and the story should be set in New York City.
Fearing the power of her agent and the fame the imminent release of a hot new song will garner her, the producer agrees. Miyako must furiously rewrite her entire story in minutes. But, as the play starts (more or less) on schedule, others make their equally outrageous demands known too. The cast and crew start to take sides—some for the producer and his “the show must go on” attitude, and some for the crushed housewife, whose carefully written artistic creation is crumbling before her, Eventually, the battles in the studio outdo the drama on air.
By the time the show is finished, a maudlin, rural drama becomes an epic urban drama, full of machine guns and even space travel. Everyone leaves relatively happy and life goes on.
With its zany humour and hysterical (yet logical) leaps into the absurd, Welcome Back Mr. McDonald exposes the fissures in Japan’s much-vaunted social apparatus, particularly the collective decision-making process so admired by Western “management consultants” and the (misguided?) appropriation of American culture by much of Japanese urban culture.
—Noah Cowan
Happy Go Lucky
Tetsuya Nakashima
Japan 1995
70 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: FAT Inc./Sasso Inc.
Executive Producer: Haruo Takarada
Cinematographer: Shoichi Atoh
Editor: Seiji Endoh, Chiaki Tohyama
Sound: Junichi Shima
Music: Yoko Kanno
Principal Cast: Ittoku Kisibe, Kumi Nakamura, Maki lsikawa, Noriko Nagi, Yoshitomo Hidaka
Tetsuya Nakashima’s first film is a delight. Extremely funny, poignant and beautifully made, its concern with the inner life of a child recalls the films of Shinji Soomal (Moving).
Takashi is a fourth-grader who cannot do the most basic exercise during gym class. His teacher isolates him and four other “horizontal bar losers” and tells them that they should “help each other and overcome difficulties.”
The humiliation and segregation bring the group together and prompt a series of traumatic memories in Takashi, especially about his father, who recently locked himself in a karaoke room with a high-school girl. He also suffers the degradation of his sister appearing as a nude model in the country’s most popular magazine. It’s a tough time for him, but he suffers through it with philosophical whimsy and prescient wonder.
Although light on its feet, Happy Go Lucky has much to say about the role of shame in Japanese society. It also contains stunning camerawork—Tetsuya was a gifted director of commercials—and an uncanny sense of timing. Never too broad, its gentle pauses and credibly absurd situational humour show the mark of a very strong directorial hand indeed.
—Noah Cowan
Down the Drain
Shinobu Yaguchi
JAPAN, 1993
92 minutes Colour/16mm
Production Company: Pia Corporation/Pony Canyon Inc.
Producer: Binbun Furusawa, Mana Katsurada
Screenplay: Shinobu Yaguchi, Takuji Suzuki, Yasunobu Nakagawa
Cinematographer: Binbun Furusawa, Kazuhiro Susuki
Editor: Shinobu Yaguchi
Principal Cast: Saori Serikawa, Mr. Okure, Miwako Kazi, Akane Asano
Shinobu Yaguchi’s raucous first film, born from the amazingly fertile scholarship programme of the Pia Corporation—steadily becoming a kind of Sundance Institute of Japan—was, along with Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s A Touch of Fever, the first indication that a fascinating new crop of filmmakers was emerging from Japan.
Although it comes from an entirely different cultural universe, the wonderful, off-kilter comedy of Down the Drain has an anarchic narrative quality and a concatenation of Japanese cultural archetypes that mirror Shinya Tsukamoto's cyberpunk Tetsuo films. It is also fascinated with the inner life of teenagers, a theme constantly popping up in the New Beat.
It tells the story of Junko, a schoolgirl, who unwittingly sets off a catastrophic chain of events, after being caught using her friend’s train pass. Escaping the scene of her crime, she runs to her grandmother’s house. No one is there. Her parents soon arrive to inform her that grandmother has died; all drive back home, but a car crash leaves Junko alone. Recovering grandmother’s ashes, she walks home until she trips and drops the old woman’s remains into an oncoming street-sweeper. The day just gets better and better.
Like many of the New Beat, Yaguchi has an irreverent fascination with the history of Japanese cinema, and the film is full of clever quotations from old masters.
—Noah Cowan