LONDON FILM FESTIVAL: Still The Water (2014)

This short review appeared on The Upcoming website here as part of their coverage of the London Film Festival.

A film of love, life and death on the island of Amami, south of the Japanese mainland, Still the Water attempts to represent the traditions of a small island community as two children come to terms with death.

The film follows Kyoko (Jun Yoshinaga) and Kaito (Nijiro Murakami) as they both come face-to-face with death. Kyoko falls in love with the moody Kaito, who is significantly less mature than she is. Kaito’s parents have divorced and neither seems to spend much time with Kaito, who suffers in silence. Meanwhile, Kyoko is trying to come to terms with her dying mother. Then Kaito finds a corpse floating in the sea.

The film has a real human warmth to it, and there are many scenes that manage to convey some universal truths about life and death and our inability to fully grasp these big questions. The main problem with the film is that its success or failure may depend on the degree of one’s sympathy for films that juxtapose the permanence of nature with the human struggles playing out in its midst. In this respect, the film is much too long and somewhat conventional for its own good. A more experimental or vibrant film might have better represented these themes more successfully than a lot of sober looks into the middle distance followed by shots of wind blowing through foliage. Oftentimes it feels cold and intellectual when it should be emotional and the graphic goat slaughtering scenes seem to paradoxically suggest that the kind of natural grace the film represents is only open to humans. Similarly, the film’s triumphant ending, thanks to a judicious use of blur, seems to unintentionally suggest that an embrace of nature should only go so far.

The film ends with a typhoon, which both threatens to engulf the humans or bring some sort of clarity, but the film remains somewhat vague. The character’s emotional journeys are clearly mapped out (almost too precisely) but we are left with a feeling that we have not learnt anything we didn’t know before. One death scene is presented lyrically and rather movingly, but only because it totally ignores the pain and the discomfort of the act of dying. It is a warm film, but it feels only surface deep – a film betraying the influence of Malick, Herzog, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi but few ideas of its own.

REVIEW: Like Father, Like Son (2013)

Like Father, Like Son is a comedy-drama about the nature vs. nurture debate written and directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Kore-eda Hirokazu. Two families (the Nonomiya and the Saiki families) lives are turned upside down when they inadvertently discover that their sons (Keita and Ryusei – played by Keita Yukari and Shogen Whang respectively) were switched in the hospital shortly after their births. The rest of the film is taken up with examining how the parents cope with this discovery and whether they decide to keep the child they’ve raised or swap them.

Central to this issue is the question of whether you can raise a child as your own or if there is something in the blood, which makes the time spent together (here six years) null and void. Nonomiya Ryota (Fukuyama Masaharu), the film’s ultimate protagonist, is a hard-working and somewhat cold individual. He has always been slightly disappointed by his son Keita, who he finds to be a rather mediocre child. Following the revelation that Keita is indeed not Ryota’s son, Ryota exclaimed, “It makes sense.” Ryota and his wife Midori (Ono Machiko) find themselves drawn towards their much more active and confident biological son Ryusei, finding similarities in him that they never found in Keita. These ideas about childhood – whether a child’s personality is the result of his parent’s genes or of his surroundings and upbringing – are played with throughout the film. At one rather funny moment, Ryota watches as Ryusei and his ‘father’ Yudai (Lily Franky) both chew on the end of their straws, clearly worrying that the smart, industrious son that he feels he deserves has neglected his potential thanks to the parenting of the frivolous and childish Yudai.

For two hours, Kore-eda spins out this happy-sad funny-grim yarn, keeping it fairly interesting and involving along the way. Though dramatic – if not potentially traumatic – Kore-eda keeps things light and, disappointingly, conventional. It has been suggested that the film’s Jury Prize win at this year’s Cannes Film Festival had something to do with Steven Spielberg, head of the jury, seeing something of a match here with his own artistic sensibilities – dark, grim but light and sentimental.

Aside from the nature vs. nurture stuff that the film plays around with, the film is mainly about different forms of fatherhood, with Ryota representing the tough, authoritarian type who shows his love for his child through a philosophy of being hard on a child so that it will be better later. Yudai, meanwhile, is more playful. He bathes with his kids, he is always late and constantly brings himself down to their level. While Ryota may make an adult out of his kid, they would have a lot more fun with Yudai. There are class implications here as well, with Ryota looking down at Yudai’s place of work and home (the same slightly rundown place) while his own house and place of work are tall, impersonal towers – his home frequently compared to a hotel room. Ryota wonders if he shouldn’t take both sons in order to safeguard their futures or, in other words, to save them from a life like Yudai’s. This, sadly, is an all too believable way of thinking (Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone is so taken with the idea that it even suggests that childless middle class parents are justified in kidnapping working class kids for their own good), and suggests that the film might be making a point. And yet the film does not go much further than this – although admittedly the scene in which he embarrassedly blurts it out to Yudai is very unexpected and funny. Ryota is inevitably made to feel guilty for having such thoughts and redeemed while Yudai’s parenting methods are never seen in a negative light. Kore-eda sets up a fruitful situation but is ultimately unwilling to pursue it much beyond a simplistic Hollywood reading. For one thing, the mothers Midori and Yukari (Maki Yoko), where the drama ought to find all the pain and anguish it would need, are particularly underdeveloped. They are instead relegated to the sidelines, watching the men sort it, and themselves, out.

So while Like Father, Like Son is likable, funny, interesting, nicely-shot and full of good performances (even amongst the younger actors – Kore-eda is noted for his work with child actors), it is disappointingly tame. It doesn’t go as far as it might have. However, though a fault, it is one that is easy to see past. After all, one would not expect more from, say, Hollywood and it would a mistake to expect more of a film just because it happens to be Japanese. So although the film does not go anywhere dark or risky, this was not Kore-eda’s intention. And as a light, conventional family drama, Like Father, Like Son, though slightly overlong, stands out from the rest for its invention, sincerity and warmth. And it’s not overly tacky.

REVIEW: Like Someone In Love (2013)

Like Someone In Love is the new film from Abbas Kiarostami, a mannered yet experimental work, the effect of which is tellingly represented in the varying critical responses. As is widely reported, the film’s screening at last year’s Cannes Film Festival was less than complementary for the film and many of the reviews that followed seemed incomplete, as if the critics needed to see the film a second time, and in more hospitable surroundings, to fully appraise the film’s strengths and/or weaknesses. The film’s recent release has resulted in some critical reassessment.

The story is slight and is mainly utilised as a starting point for ruminations on identity and deception. Just like some of Kiarostami’s other films, the plot of Like Someone In Love can be summarized with a high degree of accuracy with one sentence – “A man wishes to die and searches for someone to assist him” (A Taste of Cherry) or “A female taxi driver and her fairs discuss life” (Ten). Like Someone In Love is about a female prostitute Akiko (Takanashi Rin) meeting a client, the elderly Watanabe (Okuno Tadashi), while dealing with a possessive boyfriend Noriaki (Kase Ryo).

The film is primarily interested in the mutability of the characters’ identities as they move through a variety of meetings and situations. The issues that the film raises are much the same as those in Kiarostami’s previous film, the somewhat avant garde-lite Certified Copy, although here they are treated much more concretely and more successfully. Essentially the film suggests that we are never the same with different people and that we never truly know ourselves, which means that our identities are constantly shifting. This is represented in an initially funny, playful way as each character must deceive others concerning their relationships and the film addresses this deception in many different forms.

When Akiko visits the obviously shy and awkward Watanabe (we never get any indication that he is the sort of man who would frequently or even casually use the services of a prostitute), she expresses interest in a painting (the first painting to treat a typically Japanese subject in a Western style) in order to bring him out of his shell. What seems like a nice, casual conversation becomes slightly darker and more aloof when one considers that Akiko is performing, that she is pretending to have a familiarity with the painting in order to do her job more effectively. The characters are frequently placed in such positions during which the audience is left unsure about their true motivations. Later, Watanabe will pretend to be Akiko’s grandfather so that Noriaki will not suspect her and yet, later, will bluntly tell him that he is not her grandfather. Noriaki seems to catch on but does not react, instantly (as if as by a defence mechanism) morphing from Akiko’s boyfriend into a mechanic – his profession – spotting the sound of a clapped-out car belt.

Kiarostami’s most experimental move also highlights this idea of the mutable, unfixed identity with the beginning of the film. The film begins in the middle of a scene. We hear a conversation but we do not know what is being discussed and by who. We are in a nightclub busy with customers, but we are initially unsure about what relation what we are seeing has with what we are hearing. It is a fascinating beginning – eloquent as much of the film’s central theme concerning identity as of the audience’s apparent need for a clear-cut relationship with the characters and events on the screen. We stare at the screen, trying desperately to decipher it so that it will make more sense, absolutely incapable of merely accepting that we are not yet meant to know. The film’s ending is similar, finishing sharply where there would appear to be a lot more of the story yet to unfold – again representative both of the film’s concern with identity and deception and with our own need for closure and narrative completeness. This apparent beginning after the real beginning and ending before the real ending was what misdirected a lot of the early commentary on the film.

Kiarostami presents his theme with flair and a teasing ingenuity – one character, introduced late in the film, seems to be merely an annoyance until we unexpectedly hear more about her, at which point she becomes the most tragic and pitiable character of all. It is constantly developed throughout the film to such an extent, however, that the film may feel slightly contrived and one-note. However, the performances of the three leads make up for this. Takanashi Rin is fantastically unknowable, moving through a series of moods but never giving away which are genuine and which are more calculated. Okuno Tadashi is movingly vulnerable but sometimes equally deliberate. Kase Ryo is unlikeable until we meet him at which point he becomes sympathetic. When he again disappears he again becomes unlikeable as if his present and absent selves are different.

Like Someone In Love is one of those thoroughly rewarding examples of art cinema in that it improves the longer one is away from it. It is a film that requires an active mind to make sense of it and, ultimately, to put it all together and it is consistently worth the effort.

See also Certified Copy (2010)

REVIEW: A Stranger of Mine (2005, released 2012)

A Stranger Of Mine is a 2005 comedy-drama directed by Kenji Uchida, which takes as its subject the remarkable interdependence between a number of people who are all largely unknown to each other. Over one evening, the lives of several people will intertwine in a variety of ways.

The film begins with Maki Kuwata (Reika Kirishima) locked out of her boyfriend’s apartment. Homeless, penniless and heartbroken, Maki finds herself in a restaurant when she is suddenly invited to dine with Yusuke Kanda (Sô Yamanaka), a private detective, and his friend, Takeshi Miyata (Yasuhi Nakamura), a hard working businessman.

Miyata is also heartbroken, having been cruelly dumped by the love of his life, Ayumi (Yuka Itaya), just six months before. When Kanda suddenly leaves, Miyata finds himself alone with Maki. Finding out that she has nowhere to go, Miyata asks her to spend the night in his empty apartment. This proves to be only the beginning of a night that seems like it will never end…

Though the description above does not sound like anything special, as indeed is the film’s first half hour, the film is soon jumping backwards and forwards in time, switching protagonists as well as styles and, even, genres. The film begins as a melodrama, focusing on Maki’s grief. Though offset somewhat with Godardian intertitles and visual and audio montage, the melodrama is primarily established by slow fades and whispering voiceovers about loneliness. It is not long before the film switches to rom-com, with a tendency towards serendipity, awkward first meetings and upbeat guitar twangs. Though not without its nicely judged moments and an evident directorial subtlety – shots are frequently held for a long time from a fixed position, allowing the actors to take precedence over the editing, as in the best moments of Ozu – the film can’t help but feel overly simplistic and conventionally twee.

However, the film soon shifts protagonist and genre once again, this time following Kanda, the private detective, throughout the same evening. To give away what genre follows, or to give away any more of the plot(s), would be to rob the viewer of the delights of A Stranger Of Mine. Suffice it to say that the film becomes more and more surprising, much funnier and a greater entertainment. The twisting narrative is presented with invention, wit and without the heavy-handedness of some of the work of Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro González Iñárritu. The film not only makes up for the beginning, but also makes you instantly want to watch it all over again.

Though the film is largely far from serious, it remains a fascinating study of our own limited perspectives. From one angle, a character may appear hectoring and condescending, but when the angle shifts and we get to meet that character, they becomes nervous and desperate. By deftly switching protagonists and genres, writer-director Kenji Uchida allows us to see the same scene from several different perspectives and worldviews. As a result, what was initially romantic may become tense, cynical or ridiculous. On the other hand, the film also details how small, seemingly insignificant actions might hugely affect the lives of other people. In fact, this film does in 97 minutes what took Lucas Belvaux three films and five and a half hours to do with his intriguing but long-winded One, Two, Three Trilogy. All that and a playful trick ending and a note-perfect resolution, one that makes you want to see the scene that immediately follows and, maybe, the scene after that.

Aside from the twisting narrative, which is ultimately the film’s main focus, A Stranger Of Mine also offers several funny moments as well as a riveting plot and some very clever genre deconstructions. Even when you know what genre Kenji Uchida has adopted, you are still never sure quite where the film is going. In fact, the sequences involving Kanda are good enough for a single, straightforward narrative feature on its own merits. Even the film’s score is funny, mocking the typical scores that come with each genre change. Hence, the action score is ridiculously overblown and the romantic score – so annoying initially – is soon revealed as knowingly sentimental.

Oddly enough, one of the film’s most pleasing features is its total lack of any violence, swearing or nudity. Though hardly a family film, it avoids the extremities of Tarantino and Iñárritu, delivering a film that is enjoyable without leaving a sickening taste in the mouth.

Though initially the film may be a little hard to take, it soon redeems itself with an almost infectious sense of playfulness and a genuinely entertaining storyline. The acting is generally very good and, despite the film’s themes, it is ultimately a fun movie, made with an emphasis on having a good time.

A Stranger Of Mine is showing as part of the Whose Film Is It Anyway?: Contemporary Japanese Auteurs festival from February 10 to March 28 at the ICA (London), the Showroom Workstation (Sheffield), the Filmhouse (Edinburgh), the Glasgow Film Theatre (Glasgow), the Queen’s Film Theatre (Belfast), the Watershed (Bristol) and the Broadway (Nottingham). It is well worth seeking out.

See also: Heart, Beating in the Dark (2005)

REVIEW: Heart, Beating In The Dark (2005, released 2012)

Heart, Beating In The Dark is a 2005 film from Shunichi Nagasaki, based on that director’s own 1982 original, in which a young couple, Ringo and Inako, try to deal with life after killing their own daughter. Part re-imagining, part reappraisal, the film concerns itself with questions of morality, guilt, regret and memory.

The film begins with the following voiceover: “In 1982, Nagasaki Shunichi made a Super-8 film called Heart, Beating In The Dark, starring Naito Takashi and Muroi Shigeru. It was the story of a young couple on the run after killing their own child. 23 years later, a remake of the film was to be made.”

What goes on in Heart, Beating In The Dark is rather difficult to describe. It is, in essence, four films in one. The film intercuts between the Super-8 original, a sequel with the original actors, a remake with new, younger actors, and a faux-documentary about the filming of the remake – all to somewhat confusing effect.

Naito Takashi and Muroi Shigeru return twenty-three years later to play the older Ringo and Inako in the sequel, as well as themselves in the making-of documentary. Naito and Muroi wish to return to the characters in order to do right by them as, in the intervening years, they have been troubled by how the original Heart, Beating In The Dark ended. Naito wishes to meet Ringo in the remake in order to slap him in the face, while Muroi wants to give Inako the help she always needed but never got.

Meanwhile, two young actors, Shoichi Honda and Noriko Eguchi, are recruited to play the child-killing couple, now renamed Toru and Yuki, in the remake. In the end, the boundaries between original, sequel, remake and documentary clash – Naito and Muroi are confronted with their younger selves, in the figures of Honda and Eguchi, and in their characters, Toru and Yuki.

Heart, Beating In The Dark is undeniably a multi-layered and fascinating work. It addresses regret and self-loathing in both a fictional and (apparently) non-fictional manner, as well as looking at the connections between memory and cinema. Naito Takashi, the lead actor of the controversial original film, has come to see the film in a different light, now finding it to be the contemptible work of a young man. Older and wiser, Naito seems to want to readdress the film from a more moral standpoint. So, evidently, does Shunichi Nagasaki, although he is largely invisible but for brief glimpses during the documentary segments.

However, as interesting as the film may be, Heart, Beating In The Dark is a rather difficult watch. It can initially be difficult to work out what each of the mostly-independent segments are, especially at one early stage in which Muroi, or Muroi playing Inako, is seen watching over Yuki, or Noriko Eguchi playing Yuki. However, as the film progresses, this problem is dealt with, such that the moments when the sequel and/or the documentary invade the remake become the film’s standpoint scenes.Essentially, the original and the remake sequences of the film enact a narrative of shame, mutual loathing and punishment rituals, with a Brechtian interlude in which Ringo and Toru both give interviews, or confessions, about the events that led up to the killing of their daughters. A strong feeling of fatalism pervades with the sequel haunting the remake, as the original seems to haunt the faux documentary. We see what the characters will become just as we see what the actors will become, and how shame has, in one way or another, effected their lives.

REVIEW: Throne of Blood (1957)

  Throne of Blood is a Japanese transposition of William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Far from a pat GCSE reading of the original play, the film manages to make the story it’s own with some haunting visuals and a surprisingly successful cultural shift – it being a samurai version of the play.

  The film begins in a timeless, mist-strewn and desolate landscape, which, as a foreboding monument informs us, was once the site of Cobweb Castle, briefly held by Washizu, the Macbeth figure, played by Toshirô Mifune in his typically hyperbolic fashion. The film then goes back to time to an unspecified war-torn period in Japan. Lord Tsuzuki (Hiroshi Tachikawa) is facing insurrection from all sides and it looks like it may soon be the end of his reign. However, reports that the battles are turning in his favour are soon coming in, and it is revealed that the valour of two of Tsuzuki generals, Washizu and Miki (Minoru Chiaki), are responsible. The insurrection is soon stopped.

  While travelling to Cobweb Castle to be rewarded for their efforts, Washizu and Miki get lost in Cobweb Forest, waylaid by an intangible evil spirit. They confront the spirit, played as an old woman by Chieko Naniwa, who tells them that they may each expect good fortune in the future. Washizu is to become master of North Castle, and later Cobweb Castle itself, while Miki is to become master of Fort One and later, that his son will take control of Cobweb Castle. The two samurai laugh this prophecy off, until they arrive at Cobweb Castle, where Washizu is rewarded with North Castle and Miki with Fort One.

  Throne of Blood begins with a slow-paced, but atmospheric prologue that established the overall tone of potent and contagious evil and cold determinism. It is clear from the beginning, particularly to anyone familiar with the play, that Washizu will come to a bad end, but Kurosawa is not interested in creating a surprising narrative with several twists and turns. Filled with slow-paced panning and tracking shots and with an offbeat score, the film moves along slowly, but with much deliberateness. From the moment that Washizu meets the evil spirit, he starts down the path that will lead to his ruin. The final five minutes plays out as a startling but inescapable conclusion. It is excessive and horrifying in both its brutality and in its inevitability.

  Kurosawa’s pessimism concerning the nature of fate drips into the film’s settings, which are all shrouded in mist and appear to be on the verge of collapsing into sheer chaos. Cobweb Forest, particularly, is a maze of impassible foliage and dark shadows, frequently shrouded in a rather sinister mist. Similarly, the battle scenes in the film are fast-paced and confused. War, like the spirits in the film, is remorselessly evil and too huge for the scope of this film. As a result, most of the battles are kept off-screen but their disastrous effect is all too keenly felt. The Japan of Throne of Blood is ravaged by war and at the mercy of evil forces such as the spirit who puts Washizu on the path of destruction and who seems to live in the ubiquitous mist. War and evil spirits are impenetrable forces, under which man is a small and somewhat comical figure. When the ghost of the Banquo figure appears at Washizu’s celebrations, the film uses this not as a manifestation of Washizu’s guilt, but as another moment in which Washizu is manipulated by spirits. Kurosawa is not interested in the psychology of his characters, but in detailing their constant and unavoidable decline. His is not so much a story of ambition, but of collaspe and ruin.

  Mifune plays Washizu in his usual register, mad and flamboyant. He constantly overplays, whether he is cowed in front of his manipulative wife, who spurs him on towards murder after murder, or when panicked or angry. No one watching the film could mistake Washizu for a sympathetic character, as Kurosawa and Mifune are more interested in presenting a tyrant. Similarly, Washizu’s wife Asaji, played by Isuzu Yamada, with almost demonic make-up and a slow, haunting voice, whispering her short manipulative sentences, is an unrealistic but nonetheless revealing creation. In fact, Yamada is so convincing as a cold and evil woman driven to succeed that her decline into madness – presented suddenly and rather matter-of-factly – can’t help but be unconvincing.

  Throne of Blood is not without its flaws. An icy-cold and detached film about determinism and evil, it is slightly overlong and there are a few sequences that should be haunting and atmospheric but instead feels just wilfully slow. At times, the film seems to stall and it is a few minutes before it picks itself up again. As well as this, the film is extremely theatrical, in a manner that is meant to be distancing, but which becomes, at times, unintentionally funny and, frequently, overblown. The film seems to begin with the apocalypse and to get more chaotic from there, and while this approach is an intriguing reading of the original play and makes for some fantastic sequences, such as Washizu’s second encounter with the spirit in Cobweb Forest, it can be off-putting, distracting and a little annoying.

  Throne of Blood is a powerful and challenging film with a pervasive feeling of malignant forces working away under the surface, not unlike the black figures of Japan’s Bunraku theatre. Despite a tendency to overplay, which is rather rare for Kurosawa, and some difficult pacing, the film is an intriguing version of Shakespeare’s play. While not entirely faithful to Shakespeare’s plot, it is faithful to Shakespeare’s mood and meaning. As far as Shakespeare adaptations go, Throne of Blood is one of the best as well as one of the more interesting.

REVIEW: 13 Assassins (2011)

  13 Assassins is the new film from the prolific though controversial director Miike Takashi of Audition and Ichi the Killer fame. The Miike films available in the West are mostly bloody, shocking and confrontational. While 13 Assassins is bloody, it retains a more classical form, recalling the work of Akira Kurosawa and Kudô Eiichi, from whose 1963 film this is a remake. One of the film’s main calling cards, however, is that, in the face of a cinema saturated with post-modern self-awareness, this film refreshingly plays it straight.

  Set in 1840s Japan, the sadistic Lord Naritsugu (Inagaki Goro) is causing an outcry with his brutal acts of rape and murder against his subjects. Due to his high political standing, he is untouchable. One official, Doi (Hira Mikijiro), secretly hires outmoded samurai Shinzaemon Shimada (a very good Yakusho Kôji) to gather eleven swordsmen to assassinate Naritsugu. The samurai are eager to live out the samurai code despite it being an anachronism and are more than willing to die honourably.

  13 Assassins begins with a man disembowelling himself before speeding through the exposition. Miike focuses on the various atrocities carried out by Naritsugu, making him a villain that it is very easy to hate, before introducing the film’s hero, Shinzaemon, and the other samurai. He economically sets the basic plot in motion, though in typical Miike fashion, he does linger too much on the spectacle of violence in the early part of the film, labouring the point somewhat. Once the binary oppositions are established, however, the film becomes a lot more interesting.

  The film has an intriguing insight into the life of a samurai who finds himself out of place in an increasingly modern world, in which his code is outdated and his chances of an honourable death in battle are slim. Each of the samurai are perfectly willing to die in the battle, which makes for some rousing drama during the final expertly made 45-minute battle sequence. As an action film, it is exciting, though it retains an interesting undercurrent, typified in the character of Shinzaemon and his old sparring rival/ Naritsugu’s lieutenant Hanbei (Ichimura Masachika). Finding themselves on opposite sides and both unable to capitulate, the dramatic centre of the film is found in their relationship, one that fascinates the film while it criticizes it.

  Unfortunately, thirteen is too many characters to be able to care about and only a few stand out during the climatic battle sequence. However, in the style of Hollywood swashbucklers and westerns, it is easy to empathize with the group rather than the individuals, especially due to the careful characterizations of their leaders and the overt villainy of their enemy. However, the film remains critical of them, emphasizing their lack of individuality in the face of orders and their almost pompous seriousness. The 13^th assassin, Koyata (Iseya Yûsuke, playing the Toshiro Mifune role) is a bandit who constantly mocks the samurai and their inability to have fun.

  Though a thoroughly entertaining and exciting action film made by a director who respects the material enough to keep his tongue out of his cheek, 13 Assassins chiefly stands out as a film that looks at a society finding itself on the verge of modernity, where the only future lies in a radical change of values or death. As such, the film recalls Sergei Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West, both as a pleasing formal exercise and as a moving testament to an extinct way of life.