Tag: Japan

Despite containing the worst movie of the Berlinale (and the only bad one), this last weekend were definitely the best days in my book. The venues were relaxed, all those business-y people were gone and I saw the best and most enjoyable films on these days. That is largely due to this extremely successful Sunday!

When I was lining up with the old man the Sunday before, some girl from Hongkong came up to me and asked me if I could buy tickets for the Wednesday screening of “Close-Knit” (preceded by the question if I was Chinese yadda yadda). Since I figured the screening was not particularly hard to get anyways, I agreed. She was so happy it worked out that she didn’t want any change from the 25 euros she gave me. Well, I hope she and her friend enjoyed the film was much as I did.

Since the tickets were so cheap, I also bought some for Pixelmatsch and wife-cousin so we can go together, and for awhile I wasn’t sure if they were going to come. So I asked around and shockingly none of my friends/acquaintances were interested in seeing the film! Pixelmatsch and Co. ended up coming, and the others definitely missed out, hurr hurr.

Karera ga Honki de Amu toki wa (Close-Knit)
Japan 2017, Naoko Ogigami, 127′

I called the film “Rent-a-neko 2” when I told Pixelmatsch about it, but in reality I sensed that this film would be different from the other Ogigami films I have seen. Before the screening, I thought it would be similar to a Banana Yoshimoto adaptation with more of a feel-good feeling, but I was utterly wrong. “Close-Knit” did have a lot of feel-good scenes, but unlike Ogigami’s other films, it lives much less in an ideal dream world and confronts its characters’s real life problems with more realism and allows them to feel actual sadness. At the same time, the general tone of the film is utterly optimistic and the exact opposite of the melancholy pervading most of Yoshimoto’s books.

For me this direct confrontation actually made the film good. For the first hour or so, I was a little unsure about what to think. It seemed like a generic Japanese film to me, and so utterly predictable: There was Tomo’s first slightly awkward meeting with Rinko, a trans-woman who enjoys having large breasts, Rinko’s characterization as very very feminine woman who makes cute chara-ben and takes care of elderly, a flashback about Rinko’s past and how she opened up to her mother etc. etc. I guess I largely found Rinko a little clichéd. Yes, I know that it means a lot to trans-people to look like their gender, but from my own experience you can look and feel womanly with small breasts too – after all you don’t have to be biologically a man to lack a decolleté. (Though I do realize that this wisdom is nearly impossible to achieve at teenage age.) And of course Rinko’s sheer amazingness and caring personality makes Tomo slowly reconsider what is “normal” or what it means to be a woman or a mother. As a result, for awhile I found myself significantly more bored than watching “On body and soul”, and I remembered that all of Ogigami’s films feel a little slow.

But then the storyline took a turn and became more dramatic in a good way. We see what it actually means to live in a society that has so much trouble accepting anything outside the norm, with some spiteful anonymous person calling the police to come to their house and check whether Tomo is being abused, or Rinko being forced to stay overnight in a hospital room with men because they wouldn’t recognize her as a woman. I was touched when Tomo sprayed her friend’s mother’s face with dish detergent out of anger when she called Rinko a freak, which made Tomo’s transformation into a more open-minded person very satisfying to watch. (People in the audience loudly cheered when she did that, by the way.) I also liked the rest of the revelations (much unlike the first flashback), where Tomo’s mother’s side is slowly being revealed. At the same time, the second part still focuses strongly on Rinko’s coming to terms with her sex change (and parting with her manly body parts) and the knitting of 108 woolen penises (with tax!) made it very heartwarming. Oh and I loved the end in which Tomo, of course, ended up going back to her mother’s who may or may not have a change of heart.
On a side note: True to Ogigami fashion, there are still idyllic aspects. Tomo’s new family essentially has no internal conflicts (only external), and Rinko’s mother is amazingly accepting and supportive of her daughter’s transsexuality. I think this is fine, because it gives the film its sweet atmosphere, and it’s not wholly unrealistic either: When you are an unusual person, you will over time find your little island of relationships with people who will accept you as you are, no matter how hostile the larger environment is.

OK so this posting contained big spoilers and I apologize for that, but I am sure that the film is enjoyable even when you know the entire story already. I think this is Ogigami’s strongest film to date (amongst the ones I have seen), and I know that people cried during it (I certainly could not imagine that happening for any of her other films).

This was one of the weirdest screenings I have seen in awhile, mostly because the main feature was announced as “having a bad print quality, but the film is so great that [they] are showing it anyways” and the short film that came before was a silent film that was actually – gasp! – shown silent. Even when you don’t have live music, the film usually comes with some form of musical accompaniment, but here we actually watched the 11 minute film in complete silence. I thought it was the strangest thing, and the silence itself actually made me want to fall asleep. When the main feature finally started, I immediately felt a little more awake.

Hyakunen-go no aruhi (A Day After a Hundred Years)
Japan 1933, Shigeji Ogino, 11′

In 2032, scientists bring back the spirit of a man who died 90 years ago. The man is impressed by the technological advances and learns about life in the future.

Danish dude saw these two films on another day and said he thought the silent film was the worst film he has seen in awhile. I can definitely see where he’s coming from, because the animation is absolutely horrendous. Considering that the film came 3 years after sound films came about, it is shocking how badly it is made. Sure, I tend to have high expectations for animation but I don’t expect Kyoto Animation-like quality from everybody. But even if you take history into account, if Lotte Reiniger can make “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” mostly on her own, then the lazy art in this film has no excuse.

Nevertheless, I liked the film because the story spoke to me. I thought it was humorous and at times surprisingly accurate when it comes to predicting how the world would look like one day. Sure, magnet trains don’t look like they do in the film (the style of the futuristic architecture is actually decent, it’s just the handiwork in the execution that is sloppy) but it was very interesting to see how they imagined us almost 100 years ago. In fact, I even got a little confused about when the film was made because they were talking about some “Great World War” taking place around 1942, and I was impressed that the film seems to be prescient about these kinds of details. For me, this short film oscillates somewhere between impressively good and impressively crappy, but overall I think it did not deserve to sink into obscurity.

Uchûjin Tôkyô ni arawaru (Warning from Space)
Japan 1956, K?ji Shima, 87′

The appearance of UFOs and then of actual starfish-like shaped aliens sends the people of Japan into panic. It turns out the aliens are there to warn Earth from the impending collision of a big planet which would destroy all life on Earth, and later on help the humans to survive.

Uh yeah, I don’t personally agree with the claim that the film is great, although it definitely has many entertaining moments. The starfish-like aliens are cool and positively remind me of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Naru Taru, and until the middle of the film, I was highly entertained and very grateful for the humorous story (which was something I really needed this late at night).

I think I am just allergic to Japanese victimization, so the film took a quick turn for me when the “Japan is the only country that has suffered under nuclear weapons” threat came out. The film turns Japan into this poor little country at the mercy of the greater powers of the world, just a few years after it very much aspired to be one of those great powers. This is especially apparent when the children come into play – they are completely hopeless, faceless, always in fear of something and look frumpy and desolate in the way they are styled (very very not cute, unlike the children in “Letters from a dead man” where they manage to be active characters despite being catatonic). Needless to say it is the invention of a Japanese scientist that will save them all, not an American or another otherwise, and certainly not some technology brought in by the aliens, who are described as much more advanced than humans.

Maybe it’s unfair to judge a film based on these kinds of political considerations, but despite my enjoyment of the story otherwise I was honestly quite disturbed by the subtle nationalism of it, so there we are: I found both Japanese films of the day good and bad at the same time, so in that respect they are a perfect match for each other.

It was so wonderful to see that this year I can watch the remake of a great movie from last year! I was so curious to see what Ichikawa would do differently than the already wonderful Kinugasa.

Yukinojo Henge (An Actor’s Revenge)
Japan 1963, Ichikawa Kon, 114′

For the synopsis you can really just read last year’s post, the script is nearly identical!

It’s madness to think, an actor could play the same role in a remake 28 years later. Well it’s Japan, so Kazuo Hasegawa did just that as his 300th movie and reprised his role as Yukinojo. You do see he’s older now and actually at times he does look a little too old for the role of a young man in his twenties at most. However both his feminine side and his vengeful side are still there in full bloom and I can not imagine someone else for Yukinojo. To be fair however, if judged on the performance of Hasegawa alone, I do slightly prefer the original as no matter how excellent of an actor he is, you can not unsee his age.

The remake stays faithful to the original story, no really meaningful changes are made, however the cinematography is much different: exterior scenes are deliberately shown as shot on a stage: the ground is not real dirt, the trees and houses and walls are almost symbolic, the background is solid black. It evokes a feeling of watching a theatre play. Also, most fights are stylised, no classic swordplay here. Blending and split shots galore! In general Ichikawa surprisingly went for the more artsy choices, which does work quite well with the script, as the revenge trip together with the constructed manner of the shots blend well into a Tarantinoesque artificialness.

It’s hard to say which movie is better, especially as we only have a heavily cut, almost disjointed 97-minute version of the original 5-hour 3-parter available. Without a doubt, the Hasegawa of the original is the better choice and in it’s current state the original loses to the remake which has no pacing issues for example. Ideally, the 1935 Hasegawa should have met the 1963 Ichikawa.  Scratch that, someone just needs to invent a time machine and rescue the original movie in all its glory.

What the Queen wrote as a placeholder:

Placeholder for the only movie that 6451 and Pixelmatsch saw at different time slots, but I didn’t even though I wanted to. Weirdest thing ever.

Due to some weird reasons back in 2010 that I don’t remember anymore, I never finished the Berlinale post for Yamada Yoji’s remake of this movie. Of course, I had to watch the original this year!

Ototo (Her Brother)
Japan 1960, Ichikawa Kon, 93′

Gen can be described with one word: sacrifice. Due to her stepmother’s rheumatism she manages the household while also attending school. Her younger brother Hekiro is a drifter, with no aim and no ambitions he walks through life carelessly, getting into trouble all the time. Every time Gen is there to bail him out, to protect him, to comfort him when no one else will. The mother is caricature of a Christian; influenced by a judgemental church lady she estranges herself more and more from this “weird” family in an attempt to exculpate herself. The father, a writer, has no interest in anything other than his work, offering no help to anyone. Only when Hekiro becomes seriously ill after his many escapades the family somehow pulls together.

Gen oozes sacrifice. It seeps off the screen into the audience! Hekiro is rage-inducing with his aimless drifter and seemingly complete disregard for the trouble and hurt he causes for the only person in the world that unconditionally loves him. One of the issues of the movie is that you never find out why Gen loves Hekiro so much: he has no redeeming qualities and there is no scene to explain why circumstances may have turned her so protective of her younger brother. What does work however is the portrayal of their relationship. Keiko Kishi wonderfully plays her role, as much as she oozes sacrifice, Gen’s love for her brother is tangible. Her little moment when she’s playfully upset about him are wonderfully cute and though you never understand why Gen has not abandoned her brother yet, you can easily feel the love she has for that worthless punk. In fact, Hiroshi Kawaguchi is just as proficient at being rage-inducing. His performance near the end, when he’s gravely ill and finally realises what his life has amounted to up until then is also very nice.

While the original had the better actors, the remake felt more relatable to me. Probably because the brother was less troublesome and the values and circumstances were less archaic. If you can somehow get over disagreeing with the values of the people and society the story is set in, you can enjoy some really strong performances from the main actors.

One of the nicer things about this year’s Berlinale is the high amount of Ichikawa’s movies.

Enjo (Conflagration, ??)
Japan 1958, Ichikawa Kon, 99′

Based on Yukio Mishima’s “The Temple of the Golden Pavillon” the movie tells the descent into madness of Goichi, a young Buddhist acolyte, who arrives from his dysfunctional family in the countryside to a famous Kyoto temple after his father, head monk of a small village temple, dies. Goichi with his shyness and stuttering issues is entranced by the Golden Pavillon of Shukaku Temple (a blatant ripoff of the real-life Kinkaku-ji), the most beautiful sight in the world according to his father. He’s shaken due to his father’s early death, caused by his learning of Goichi’s mother’s chronic unfaithfulness. Soon after his arrival, his psychologically abusive mother follows, only to accelerate his demise that ends in the Golden Pavillon burning down.

Just now, there was no spoiler regarding the end, as the movie is told as an elaborate flashback revealed during the police investigation. The camera is quite rigid most of the time, together with the simple lighting it’s quite efficient at evoking the rigid atmosphere of a temple. While the lack of colour is a challenge, the choice of shots makes up for it, showing the simple elegance of the temple grounds and the intricate beauty of the pavillon. The story paces itself very well through a number of flashbacks, telling Goichi’s story from his arrival shortly after his father’s death, through all the events that make him doubt the purity of those surrounding the temple, be it the head monk with his mistress, the cynical fellow monk who makes him aware of all the sinful behaviour around him or the tourists streaming in after the war, drowning the temple in money, making it even more corrupt. While the ultimate result and the sheer purity of Goichi’s madness may be hard to follow, the journey up to this point is clear and deliberately told, one can easily empathise with the troubled, pure young man losing belief in mankind and turning to fire as a cleansing agent.

As you will be able to tell, days 5 and 6 were by far my best Berlinale days. One could say that the Berlinale started out OK, then became really great, then took a dip and finally ended with a few nice but not overwhelming days.

The greatest thing about watching “Nuclear Nation II” at the Berlinale was the Q&A, actually the best one we had this year. Funahashi has this very charming way of cleverly ignoring questions by basically answering a similar question or by responding to the question with one sentence but then subtly changing the subject and moving on to hold a speech on whatever he wants to say. The Q&A is just a decoy for Funahashi to voice his agenda, but I absolutely agree with his agenda, and I am in awe of his perfect English, his charming way of speaking and asking for help for the victims. He’s the perfect activist who carefully avoids any strong words (such as “activism”), accusations towards his audience (he only accuses the Japanese government) and exaggerated pathos. He is also adding a dose of humility to it even though you can easily tell that he is a very confident person: When asked about how he made such a beautiful movie, he essentially said “I listen to people and they inspire me”. (When that question was raised, I told Pixelmatsch that I think the right answer for these kinds of things should always be “Because I’m a genius”.) The Fukushima disaster is lucky to have a spokesperson like him, although of course he can only do so much as a filmmaker.

Nuclear Nation II (Futaba kara toku hanarete dainibu)
Japan 2014, Atsushi Funahashi, 114′

Pixelmatsch discovered Funahashi back in 2008 (or 2009?), and then proceeded to watch every single film by him showing at the Berlinale. Of course he also saw “Nuclear Nation” so the continuation was a must-watch. I had an alternative for this time slot, “Alice in den Städten”, but I figured I would never actually watch “Nuclear Nation” outside of the Berlinale. But this time, I was strangely curious about this director that Pixelmatsch has been raving about for years, so I decided to come along. Luckily, it’s a documentary so there is no plot per se, and I didn’t exactly miss anything by not watching the first part. “Nuclear Nation” is basically Fukushima from 2011 to 2012 right after the disaster, and “Nuclear Nation II” is the aftermath Fukushima from 2013 to 2014, mostly focusing on the refugees from Futaba who are living cramped up in an empty school and then on the remaining traces of the lives they have left behind.

I am totally not a fan of documentaries, that is for sure. There have been a number of mixed-form fiction-documentaries which I have enjoyed (like “My Winnipeg”), but I have always had my reservations about actual documentaries. They have never felt real to me (somehow doing fiction-documentaries just seems more honest to me), and I always thought you don’t really learn the truth from it. “Nuclear Nation II” may be a big exception for me: Its message is a political one, and it is one which I find very easy to agree with. When Funahashi said that the big problem with nuclear energy is that it allows people to not see other people’s suffering, I agree that he pretty much nails the problem of all of human condition to its core. The movie made my aircon-loving self feel quite guilty for sure!

Aside from the sympathetic message, I was in awe of how he filmed everything. There is no sentimental beauty or anything, but the cinematography and the cutting makes you feel close to the people, characters are being revisited in a coherent manner and soft music is fittingly inserted. While making a documentary, Funahashi tells stories and puts them together in a clever narrative structure. Needless to say I liked how he shoots the people and especially the places they have left behind. He tells those stories in an engaging manner but without rushing, while lingering on some shots just like the people linger on their previous lives, while getting his political points across in a clear but not blatant manner.

Speaking of the music, I was surprised that Ryuichi Sakamoto wrote a title song for the film, because the movie is such a low-budget, crowd-funded thing. But then I saw it was titled “for futaba” so I figured Sakamoto wrote the song for free to help. (And indeed, his Wikipedia indicates that he is part of an anti-nuclear-energy group.) This is probably the best music I have heard in an indie production ever since “Hoshi no Koe”, so kudos to everyone involved in that.

All in all, you can probably tell that I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer competence with which “Nuclear Nation” was made. For someone who only mildly cared for the Fukushima disaster back in the day, I am glad to see that there is someone capable who follows these people so closely and so persistently.

A movie about Zainichi (Koreans living in Japan)? Of course I have to watch that!

Mizu no koe o kiku
Japan 2014, Masashi Yamamoto, 129′

Minjung and Mina start a cult in Okubo, Tokyo’s Koreatown. All Minjung does is listen to the poor souls that come to her and then she does some vaguely shamanistic Korean stuff and answers with Horoscope-style platitudes in Korean. For some reason however, people willingly buy into “God’s Water” and with the help of a few business-minded acquaintances the thing spirals into a full-on commercial new age cult. In the middle of this, her estranged father laden with Yakuza debt shows up and asks for money. Slowly, the cult and the Yakuza spiral out of control until the big clash. At the end Minjung, who actually started to take her mission in the cult seriously, comes out broken and turns to her Korean roots to heal.

What a rollercoaster! The movie starts out as a biting satire of first-world trash-spirituality, introduces identity and family conflicts, turns into a coming-of-age movie and goes into soulsearching, broken up by a highly dramatic and close-hitting scene that almost seems to much but in this context somehow makes sense. One implicit point the movie makes is, that commercial cults and organised crime basically happen in the same way, as the rise and fall of the cult mirrors that of a classic mafia story perfectly. While the story takes many serious turns, the lighter moments help bond with the characters and make you care about them.

Other than that, the movie also has value as a look into life in the Zainichi community, showing the struggles and the assimilation that happens with the young Koreans in Japan. It seems like Hallyu (the wave of Korean pop culture drowning all of Asia) actually helps the Zainichi by fueling their self-worth in a country that seems otherwise hellbent to view them as second class citizens.

Dari Marusan
Japan 2014, Izumi Takahashi, 103′

Dari, a young woman, is both deaf and a genius detective for lost pets, basically keeping afloat by herself the little agency she’s employed at. She seems to live a relatively normal life, getting engaged to her not very successful but loving boyfriend and chasing down lost cats. One day, she meets the very brusque Yoshikawa who ends up hiring her to find the parakeet he set free two years ago. But what he has lost is not really the pet.

Cinematically, this is nothing to write home about. If you’ve seen one low budget Asian artsy movie, you’ve seen them all.

Outside of depicting Dari’s attempt at a normal life and Yoshikawa’s attempts at bottling up his emotions, many scenes revolve around both of them clashing with each other. The trusting and empathetic Dari finds out easily that Yoshikawa is not really searching for his parakeet but rather for the almost normal life he had with his two best friends in a somehow stable love triangle that was destroyed by pure chance. Yoshikawa on the other end challenges Dari’s trusting demeanor, threatening her many times, coming close to molesting her, always stopping short with the reason that raping a disabled girl is “no fun”, this reopens the scars from her childhood, which she tried to hide by adopting the mean nickname Dari Marusan the other children gave her. (It is a play on Daruma-san, which is a rude slang term for someone deaf as Daruma dolls don’t have ears) Every time they meet they keep pushing each other’s buttons, trying to heal their emotional wounds. The exchanges vary from tense, to uncomfortable to challenging and while they’re not the most expertly written, they are quite entertaining if you like this sort of interaction.

A new tradition is to watch at least one Tohoku Earthquake/Fukushima movie at the Berlinale. I wonder when this wave will ebb out (please excuse this incredibly horrible pun.)

Ieji (Homeland, ??)
Japan 2014, Nao Kubota, 118?

After several years in Tokyo, Jiro comes home and starts working the family farm again. It’s just that the village is completely empty because it’s in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone. Randomly, an old friend from school comes by fleeing the police and starts to live with him. Meanwhile his older half-brother Soichi with his wife, little daughter and mother-in-law live or rather vegetate in temporary housing outside the zone. The housing is so nondescript and anonymous that mother-in-law even loses her way in the rows of identical dwellings.  Initially they are not aware of Jiro’s return but someday they learn about it and Soichi wonders what happened, especially because Soichi’s stepmother, Jiro’s actual mother never got over his departure while she was still alive.

I have a shitton of respect for Sakura Ando. Besides her being a great actress she is not ashamed to look ugly, crazy or incredibly mediocre and boring, as in this movie.  The cinematography is your typical slow indie movie from Japan, so nothing to write home about (please excuse the punfest in this post!) however the pacing, relatively sparse dialogue and the general dynamic of the movie create a very interesting mood. The absolute carelessness and “slow suicide” (as his friend describes it) of Jiro feel weirdly compelling and nicely contrast the aimlessness and lack of hope in the temporary housing which feels highly suffocating. In the end it is a very nice and calm movie about how hard it is to completely lose your roots, to never be able to return to your home as it is just gone.