JAPAN CUTS July 10- 21, 2023. REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

JAPAN CUTS July 10-21, 2024. REVIEWS

GENERAL FILM FORUM

LINKS TO THE REVIEWS
All the Long Nights (Shô Miyake 2024)
August in the Water (Gakuryü Ishii 1995)
The Box Man (Gakuryü Ishii 2024)
CHa-Cha (Mai Sakai 2024)
Choke (Gen Nagao 2023)
Following the Sound (Kiyoshi Sugita 2023)
Great Absence (Kei Chika-ura 2023)
Kubi (Takeshi Kitano 2023)
Kyrie (Shunji Iwai 2023)
Look Back (Kyotaka Oshiyama 2024)
Mermaid Legend (Toshiharu Idede 1984)
Moving (Shinji Sômai 1993)
Performing Kaoru's Funeral (Noriko Yuasa 2023)
Rei (Toshihiko Tanaka 2024)
Retake (Kota Nakano 2023)
Sayonara, Girls. (Shun Nakagawa 2023)
Shadow of Fire (Shin'ya Tsukamoto 2023)
Six Singing Girls (Yoshimasa Ishibashi 2023)
Whale Bones (Takamasa Oe 2023)

[Chris Knipp]

HOKUTO MATSUMURA, MONE KAMISHIRAISHI IN ALL THE LONG NIGHTS

SHÔ MIYAKE: ALL THE LONG NIGHTS (2024)

Faulty earthlings look to the stars

One thing this film is is kind and gentle, and sui generis. Based on Maiko Seo’s novel of the same name, it focuses on two young people who both have problems, and both wind up working at the same little business, Kurita Science Corp., with a team in the Japanese style like a family almost, that produces and packages scientific tools for young people, especially microscopes. She, Misa Fujisawa (Mone Kamishiraishi) comes first, and suffers from bad PMS, Pre-Mensrual Syndrome, that causes her to break out in violent angry outbursts, one of which so much embarrasses her, she quits her fancy corporate job (which looks horribly boring anyway). He, Takatoshi Yamazoe, known throughout simply as Yamazoe (Hokuto Matsumura) has left his previous job for a similar reason: for the past two years he has had panic attacks, and he has had one at work that lost him his job.

He now cannot take a subway or bus or get a haircut or do a number of other things, and his attacks are terrifying, unpredictable, and have left this young, attractive man feeling generally angry and hopeless. He does not want to die, but he sees no pleasure in living.

These two actors, Matsumura and Kamishiraishi, have already played a couple in a TV series, and she is cute and winsome and he is handsome and they might look good together, but Miyake doesn't have romance in mind for them this time. Mark Schilling in his admiring Japan Times review says Miyake's film avoids the "usual medical melodrama stereotypes" and "creates a mood of radiant warmth and, finally, joy." Rory O'Connor in The Film Stage commends Miyake's "hushed unhurried stye" in the film. At times it felt a little too hushed and unhurried for me.

But it has its redeeming moments. It's interesting how Fujisawa's angry outbursts are handled. Yamazoe only has one big panic attack, indeed horrifying, but it is almost as impressive and interesting to see him just try to board a subway train. This comes after a trip with his (very pretty) girlfriend to the rather obnoxious and self-important woman specialist he consults with for his problem (she says, not very encouragingly, that it may take ten years for him to grow out of it). He says he will board the train, but he just stands there and then collapses in a heap by a wall afterwards, hopeless.

But there are also moments, both brief and extended, of pure charm. One is the occasion when Fujisawa comes to Yamazoe's apartment to give him a haircut. The Kurita Science Corp. annually gives a planetarium presentation and this approach to the stars and the universe provides both a climax and an activity that joins Fujisawa and Yamazoe. He does most of the writing of the program and she performs it, but the content relies a lot on notes and papers left by the dead brother of the company boss. He figures earlier in attending a grief circle - yet another strand Miyake takes up, and incidentally the ever-present Japanese issue of suicide is gently touched on.

Schilling writes that the film "ambles along without dramatic romantic declarations or floods of tears, while deepening our affection for the central characters." It goes in those other directions, too, and winds up being indefinable and so ambling and low-key there are times when seems to totally lack a pulse. But it has something to teach us, certainly, and in a gentle way.

All the Long Nights 夜明けのすべて /Yoake_no_Subete, 119 mins. debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 21, 2024, also showing at Hong Kong, Vienna, Beijing, and several other festivals. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 edition of Japan Cuts (New York, July 10-21).

[Chris Knipp]

MOTOKO OCHIAI IN WHALE BONES

TAKEMASA OE: WHALE BONES (2023)

Down the rabbit hole of social apps in search of a beautiful teenage temptress

It marks the first project from the Japanese filmmaker since Drive My Car, which he wrote alongside director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Oe also served as chief assistant director on Drive My Car, which won best screenplay at Cannes in 2021 and best international feature film at the Academy Awards. The success of that film, Oe has said, gave him the chance, with his cowriter Kaito Kikuchi, to make Whale Bones, a project he had been trying to get off the ground for a decade - and to do it in his own way, without trying to make a popular film. Apropos of modern technology, Oe says that the film’s eerie soundtrack, composed by Takuma Watanabe, features motifs written by AI that were then refined by Watanabe.

"It created an indescribably strange feeling," says Oe. "To me, it felt like a combination of digital and analogue, something that sounded like it came from the depths of the sea. It added a lot to the film."

Whale Bones explores the world of social apps as it enters into unhealthy, deeply involving night time gatherings where lonely people hover in the limbo of collective isolation, standing motionless or rushing around in groups draped in blue plastic capes. The effect is like a Japanese version of a Black Mirror episode, part sci-fi horror, part social study.

Mamiya (Motoki Ochiai) gets dumped by his girlfriend, and a male friend suggests he try a social app to find compensation. This leads him to meet Aska (Ano - Oshi no Ko), a beautiful, and mature looking high school girl, dressed to the nines. He takes her to bed but then emerging from the bathroom finds her unconscious, apparently dead, with a creepy note beside her to enjoy her body while it is still warm.

He is obviously screwed. Japanese justice is not forgiving. He has no recourse but to get rid of the body. But while he's trying to do so, the body disappears.

Why should this lead to a lot more involvement in social apps? Because Oe's and Kikuchi's story requires it, of course. The lead actor Motoko Ochiai, is interesting. In rumpled clothes, with a cowl of hair, he looks like an aging, scruffy boy, perpetually troubled, yet remote. We study his face looking for secrets. Oe has said his character is "simultaneously a perpetrator, a victim, and a witness." The several immaculate, beautiful young women he encounters (another is played by Ayaka Ônishi) are sirens, temptresses. This is today's version of the mad lover, the Majnun Layla, wandering hopelessly in search of his inaccessible Beatrice, his Laura, his Hind.

Oe has said in an interview that he had three hours or more of material but realized this was "genre" and therefore should be eighty minutes, and came up with eighty-eight. Fair enough; but the trim run-time does not keep the action from seeming long, because it is both dreary and confusing. Nonetheless there is probably material for a good Black Mirror episode in here somewhere. Not personally a big fan of Drive My Car, I'm under the impression that Oe and Hamaguchi could both use more stringent editing, despite the international accolades for their undeniable originality. But Oe knows his social/dating apps and then some, and knows how to go down the rabbit hole of obsession and desire with them.

Whale Bones 鯨の骨), 88 mins., debuted Jul. 3, 2023 at Bucheon (Fantastic Film Festival, S. Korea). It was screened for this review as part of the 2024 edition of New York's Japan Cuts (Jul.10-21).


ANO AND MOTOKO OCHIAI IN WHALE BONES

[Chris Knipp]

TAKAYUKI YAMADA, YUTAKA TAKENOUCHI IN SIX SINGING GIRLS

YOSHIMASA ISHIBASHI: SIX SINGING GIRLS (2023)

Two city men trapped by female woodland sprites

Moriichiro Kayashima (Yutaka Takenouchi) is currently working as a photographer in Tokyo, but he returnls to his family home deep in the mountains to sell and organize the mountain and family home that his father, whom he has not seen since the age of four, has left him upon dying.

After the car Uwajima is driving gets into an accident, he ends up lost in a village inhabited by strange women. Ryo Uwajima (Takayuki Yamada) is a subcontractor for a Tokyo developer who is trying to take over Kayashima's father's land formerly belonging to the father of Shin Kayashima (Yutaka Taknouchi) by forceful means. Uwaijima and Kayashima get lost in the village after Uwajima 's car crashes while giving Kayishima a ride back to Tokyo.

The main action midway is a prolonged sequence in which the six attractive women, who appear wild and mute, torment the two men in various ways, ritually, sometimes helped by small boys. It may help to know that Ishibashi is known, according to Wikipedia, as a "Japanese video, experimental film and performance artist." The women's activities and rituals are performances.

Initially the two men are frightened, horrified, and seek to escape, but they seem gradually drawn to the pure beauty of the women, who are at one with nature, or at least Kawashima is. Uwajima is attracted to one attractive girl and steps into forbidden territory. The six girls are seem as incarnations of catfish, pit vipers, owls, dormice, bees, plants, and other creatures of nature disguised as humans.They serve food made from bugs and worms. What they want from the men other than to tease or torment them may be unclear.

This film is unlisted on IMDb, but Japanese Wikipedia's article on it actually lists the six women:
"Six Women," the "beautiful and strange women who imprison Kayashima and Uwajima." They are: (1) Stinging woman/the bee (Asami Mizukawa), "a woman with a cool vibe"; (2) Wet Woman/Catfish (Aoi Yamada), "a woman with a bewitching aura"; (3) Scattering Woman/Fern (Kisaki Hattori), "a woman with a mysterious aura"; (4) Woman Baring Her Fangs/Mamushi (Minori Hagiwara), "a woman with a combative vibe"; (5) Gazing Woman/Owl (Momoka), "a woman with a quiet demeanor"; and (6) Enveloping Woman/Doormouse (Rena Takeda), "a woman with a gentle personality."

In her Screen Anarchy review, Shelagh Rowan-Legg offers an interpretation of Ishibashi's film that may be obvious, though the filmmaker's embodiment of these ideas may not be as convincing as it sounds: he is invoking a familiar folkloric idea in many cultures that there are spirits in nature that act as "protectors of forests, rivers, animals, and really, anything on which humans might prey and inflict harm," which. "humans have sadly done for a long time." This time an unscrupulous real estate agent is acquiring land for a nuclear radiation disposal plant where there happens to be an earthquake fault line. Six Singinng Girls is "part comedy, part fantasy, part eco-thriller" in which "Ishibashi is covering a lot of territory to fully explore the space, as it were, of a layered and complex story." But his execution is "perhaps not always successful."

This is indeed true, and can be traced to the mixture of genres Rowan-Legg lists, which leads to wildly uneven tone. And the action is only superficially coherent. This ultimately may be due to the filmmaker's background in experimental film and performance art. What works before a live audience doesn't necessarily work cinematically, on screen. But those who are looking for a Midsummer NIght's Dream kind of festive comedy may find satisfaction here, nonetheless. Seeing the fight to protect the natural environment as a life and death struggle, as the film does as it approaches its finale, is touching, and true.

Six Singing Girls aka The Six Singing Women 唄う六人の女, 112 mins., according to Japanese Wikipedia opened Oct. 27, 2023. It was screened for this review as part of Japan Cuts 2024.

[Chris Knipp]

STILL FROM THE BOX MAN

GAKURYÜ ISHII: THE BOX MAN (2024) JAPAN CUTS (July 10-21, 2024)

Shedding identity to live inside a cardboard box: Ishii attempts to film an avant-garde novel

Based on the novel of Kobo Abe. In black and white, with clamorous, then tinkly and delicate, score. Set in 1973, announced in English. The Box Man follows an unnamed man, and then a rival, who would give up his identity to live with a large cardboard box over his head, encountering a range of characters as he wanders the streets of Tokyo.

A description of the Abe novel is given in the original December 1974 New York Times review of it by Jerome Charyn. The book sounds potentially more interesting, thought-provoking, and evocative than the film. Perhaps this is inevitable because it's just that, as had been said, the novel's material is unfilmable, and Ishii has necessarily failed to film it adequately. But he might have stuck closer to the material.

You might consider in the Japanese context the relation between this idea of confining oneself to a cardboard box and the "Hikikomori," Japanese young people who go into extreme social withdrawal within their parental home, who may by now comprise 2% of the total population.

From Eric Rowe on Letterboxd: "Life is a continual struggle, boxing oneself off from the world only leads to decay and eventual ruin. What starts out as what one could describe as punk rock nihilistic rumination on societal rot becomes a transcendental story of self and the nature of being. Deftly balances it's absurdist comedic sensibilities with what is ultimately a film with more profound philosophical intentions. I'm not sure anyone but Ishii could pull something off quite like this, his frenetic cinematic style of his early films infused with the transcendental qualities of his very best work. A metaphysical tale -- Be open to experience, consciousness itself is shaped by everything and everyone around you -- our souls are malleable."

The box man is an idea of someone who relinquishes his identity inside an anonymous covering. It's not a practical working-out of what it would actually be like to live inside a box. Sleeping in a box is another thing entirely. Jean-Michel Basquiat reportedly did that for a brief while when he first ran away to live in Manhattan and be an aritst. When it was daytime he was out and about in New York City. At night when he wanted to sleep he climbed inside (or under?) a big cardboard box. But living in a box, or wearing a box, are different ideas, and just ideas, which works well in a fantastic, speculative novel, but is harder to make into a film. It is a meditation on identity, on the escape from society, and also on writing, because the box man keeps a constant journal from his hidden vantage point inside the box. He is as much an observer as an outlaw.

Some will watch Gakuryü Ishiii's film simply out of an interest in Japanese avant-garde filmmaking. Letterboxd contributor Shookone suggests the film is as if "kafka gets shown a random Marvel film and then has 30 mins. to write a Japanese version of it right out of his grave" and suggests Tarantino might approve. A festival blurb writer calls the film "an appropriately frenetic production chiseled with the punk ethos of Ishii’s early work," so a knowledge of that work might add to the pleasure of watching.

In the film Masatoshi Nagase stars as Myself, a photographer who becomes enraptured by the sight of a box man; however, he quickly falls into the self-fulfilled prophecy dictated by the doctrine of the box man: "Those who obsess over the box man become the box man," and so he starts trying out the role, hanging out inside a big card board box with an observation rectangle neatly cut at head height. For a while he is in his big studio playing around with a nude model, Yoko (Anana Shiramoto). This segment feels a bit like self-indulgent voyeuristic softcore porn, and not particularly "meta" or evocative of the "nouveau roman" with which the book is associated. But later there will be the duel of the two rival box men, one of whom calls the other a fraud (the fake doctor, Tadanobu Asano). At times it is all absurd and funny and mostly it is thoughtful, and it provides a wealth of illustrative cinematic imagery for the labyrinths of identity and self-concealment. The Box Man eventually becomes, if you are patient with its meanderings, an interesting film.

The Box Man 箱男, 120 mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 17, 2024, opening in Japan Aug. 23, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the Japan Cuts festival Jul. 10-21, 2024 in New York.


GAKURYÜ ISHII

[Chris Knipp]

MARI SHIRATO IN MERMAID LEGEND

TOSHIHARU IKEDA: MERMAID LEGEND (1984) (JAPAN CUTS: CLASSICS)

Diver superwoman avenger

This strange, crude, naive, but powerful film from the Eighties, some of whose action is jaw-dropping, comes out of an impulse still found today in Japanese movies. We see it in the current Japan Cuts feature, Yoshimasa Ishibashi's Six Singing Girls, where beautiful folkloric women, spirits of nature and its protectors apparently, wreck vengeance on an unscrupulous real estate agent who is acquiring land for a nuclear radiation disposal plant where there happens to be an earthquake fault line. This time all focus is on one woman, Migiwa Saeki (Mari Shirato), who is an ama (海女) – a sea-diving fisherwoman. These women, whose practice goes as far back as the Heian period, used to wear only a loin cloth but in modern times are geared all in white and dive without technical gear or oxygen for pearls or food, are natural superwomen. It's only a step to turn one of them into an avenging angel.

In this small fishing hamlet, Migiwa Saeki dives for tuna while her young husband Keisuke (Jun Etô), with whom she constantly squabbles, mans the boat and she is completely dependent on him to pull her up when she runs short of vreath and tugs on the rope. And then one day he is killed and she sees his dead body with a knife in it floating down to the ocean's floor where she is diving. Trying to escape, she is shot in the arm with a harpoon gun. She becomes a fugitive when she learns from a crooked cop that she will be accused of murdering her husband if she stays around.

The region is dominated by Mr. Miyamoto (Kentarô Shimizu), an evil businessman seeking to acquire all of the land around. His transparent pretense is to build an amusement park, but his real plan is to drive out the locals and build a nuclear power plant. He has already bought the cooperation of the local power authority, police, and mayor.

The fishermen have been getting murdered, and Keisuke has witnessed one of these, the reason for his being offed. Migiwa passes out but washes ashore. It soon becomes evident that she is indestructible, indeed a superwoman diver avenging angel more suitable to a comic strip or graphic novel than a movie.

Photographer Shohei (Kentarô Shimizu), one of Keisuke's friends / drinking buddies and, incidentally also Mr. Miyamoto's son, becomes an ally to Migiwa, though his ulterior motive is sexual: Migiwa is beautiful as well as powerful, athletic, and exuding an aura of desirability and omnipotence. Shohei will get his when he oversteps his bounds and sexually attacks Migiwa in an extraordinarily crude way after he has helped Migiwa escape to Watakano Island.

This island, which is mostly populated by women, has no law enforcement and is unpopulated except for a brothel catering to mostly wealthy clientele. Migiwa is taken to the brothel run by Natsuko (Junko Miyashita), who agrees to give her shelter as a favor to Shohei, and is given a room where she's able to recuperate from her injuries and gears up for her revenge streak.

Miyamoto stages a celebratory banquet on the island at the brothel where Migiwa agrees to serve. There she connects with Miyamoto's chief yakuza, who tells her why her husband was killed and then brutally rapes her, with bloody consequences for him - the beginning of her revenge spree.

Mermaid Legend is nothing if not unsubtle. Migiwa's revenge attacks are marked by rivers of gushing blood, which gives off a loud hissing sound as it pours all over her and everything around. Toward the end of the movie Migiwa faces off crowds of evil men where, as in a traditional action film, she repels them one by one no matter how numerous they are in attacking her.

"Incurring a siren’s sanguinary wrath—one which can only be described as a sheer force of nature—" the blurb says, "the elegiac Mermaid Legend is a brooding requiem for loss, a cautionary parable for man’s true acquiescence to the natural world." Well, it would be those things if it were a different, subtler film. But it has in its favor the compelling and committed performance and physical impressiveness of compelling central performance from Mari Shirato, and the professionalism of Toshiyuki Honda's score and Yonezô Maeda's cinematography.

Mermaid Legend人魚伝説 (Ningyo Densetsu), 110 min., at the sixth Yokohama festival (1985) won three awards; Oct. 15, 2011 (Kawasaki Shinyuri festival); screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series (Jul. 10-210.

[Chris Knipp]

TAKESHI KITANO: KUBI (2023)


A LAKE OF COSTUMED CORPSES IN KUBI

Kitano returns to the screen with a wildly violent samurai drama that is eye-popping but hard to follow

Siddlant Adlakha's review of this film for IndieWire, published for its Cannes Premieres release, is hard to beat. He praises the film, but points out that its complications drag the viewer down. It's odd, or interesting, for its "queer" aspect: it seems there is information that now can be revealed that samurais had a gay streak, and there are some messy wet male kisses. It's not clear that this adds anything.

Adlakha notes that in 1993, when Akira Kurosawa was still around, he remarked that when Kitano made a samurai film it would "surely rival" his own Saven Samurai, and this is very much not true; all we can say, as Adlakha does, is that Kubi "is not entirely without merit." But in this genre a miss is as good as a mile, and we are sorely in need of another truly great historical Japanese action film where the violence is exciting and stirring and also fully makes sense within a clear and compelling dramatic structure.

All we can say here is that the action is frequently bloody, including a knife-twisting, bloody gay kiss, and that there are many, many beheadings, probably a record number, with the full-on knife-in-the-neck shot and the head falling down off the shoulders, over and over. Oda Nobunaga (Kase Ryo) is shohwn as the first great unifier of Japan, as he has been before, and he is hunting down his rebellious vassal Murashige Araki (Endo Kenichi), helped by the "diligent, straightforward" (Adlakha's words) Akechi Mitsuhide (Nishijima Hidetoshi) and the more laid back Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Kitano himself). These three are involved in some kind of gay love triangle. Again it is not clear this adds anything. It would require a better director and a better film (and probably a lot of historical invention) to make it seem compelling and central.

The IndieWirereview summarizes that Kubi "isn’t so much about queering samurai ambition as it is about likening it to a sexual urge," but this is a distinction I'm not sure I grasp. Mostly the movie is about wanton violence, at which Kitano excels. It works better in his gangster movies where it is a kind of shock and shtick. Here is is a reminder that a better grasp of the historical context is lacking that would make a good film. IndieWire gives Kubi (which means "neck" but also "neck bag," a thing to carry severed heads as evidence) a "C+." Enough said.

Kubi, 131 mins., debuted in Premieres at Cannes 2023, also Philadelphia, Tokyo, Taipei, Torino, and Macao International Queer Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series, Jul. 10-21, in New York.

[Chris Knipp]

SADAO YAMANAKA (IN HEAD SCARF), SUPERVISES SHOOT IN NEZUMKOZO JIROKICHI

RINTARO: NEZUMKOZO JIROKICHI (2023)

Homage to a pioneer Japanese animator

A famous contemporary Japanese animator, Rintaro, was in charge of this homage to the pioneering 1930's director Sadao Yamanaka and his Nazumikozo Jirokichi. The whole film runs only 24 minutes, and is in blue and gray monochrome. Yamanaka did not reach the age of thirty, and only three of his works survive, but his influence is recognized in a country famous for its animations. This attempts to recapture one of the early master's lost films, for which scripts remain, a tale of a famous, virtuous bandit in old Edo. The new production is a collective effort involving not only Rintaro but also Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Memories), Taro Maki (Pluto, Millennium Actress) and Masao Maruyama (Ninja Scroll, Perfect Blue).

The thing here is to simulate a silent film, because Yamanaka lived in the silent era, which incidentally lasted longer in Japan due to the highly developed system of performed sound for films which audience and practitioners were reluctant to relinqish. Nonetheless there is plenty of sound - but with panels simulating those accompanying silent films.

The little animation, about the failed attempt to entrap a famous thief known as "The Rat," is not so important. What matters is the story of early Japanese animation.

Naumikozo Jirokichi, 24 mins., was screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series.

[Chris Knipp]

TETSUY CHIHARA: ICE CREAM FEVER (2023)

A playful, inventively told tale of women that revolves around an ice cream shop

Adapted from a short story by award-winning author Mieko Kawakami, this is a tale of four women and begins in a delicate and playful manner, experimenting with pastel imagery, blurry and jiggly handheld camera images, and extreme closeups. Natsumi Tokita (Riho Yoshioka), a budding designer in a rut working part-time at the shop, becomes entranced by Saho Hashimoto (Serena Motola), a new customer, reserved, confident, dressed in black, whom Natsumi becomes fascinated with. She will turn out to be an initially feted novelist now struggling with a four-year writer’s block. Meanwhile, frequent customer Yû Takashima (Marika Matsumoto), who frequents a public bath (sentō) that she will later think of taking over, is surprised by a visit from her teenage niece Miwa (Kotona Minami), who has come to Tokyo in search of her estranged father—Yu’s ex and a source of resentment between Yû and her studious sister Ai (Yumi Adachi) Miwa’s mother. These darker, more serious elements are tempered by the pastel brightness and good cheer of the ice cream shop, where a women comes in pushing a stroller loaded with little twin girls, and the background features a jazzed-up, speeded-up version of Beethoven's Fifth.

Also working in the shop is Utaha (musician Wednesday Campanella), who is small and dresses like a punk schoolgirl. This film, which announces "This is not a film" before it begins, skips around playfully among its various young women. As Emily Jisoo Bowles puts it in her Eastern Kicks review, which sees Sofia Coppola as an influence on the highly visual style, ice cream is "the sweetly sticky glue that connects the narratives." More importantly, the bright little ice cream shop sets a confidently cheery tone that also binds lives and events in the face of life's grimness - and the dominance of men. There are more women, who Bowles points out are "underused"; it's hard to keep track of them, especially since IMDb's cast list is inaccurate.

The four main women are chasing 小確幸 (Shōkakkō), Bowles suggests, using the term "coined by the Japanese novelist Murakami, which translates to 'a small but definite happiness,'" and for which ice cream and the ice cream shop no doubt are a metaphor. She further comments on the editing that its "playfully irreverent use" works like "a pink ping-pong ball" flying from scene to scene, and stopping time whenever there is a voiceover. This may be the most original film in the Japan Cuts series this year and it's more than just visually delightful, though if some of the characters feel a bit underdeveloped that shows this talented new filmmaker still may have more to offer us in her next outing.

Ice Cream Fever, 104 mins.,, debuted in Japan July 14, 2023, and also has been featured in Taiwan and Vienna. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series (Jul. 10-21).

[Chris Knipp]

YUKO NAKAMURA, AN OGAWA, AND HIDEKAZU MASHIMA IN FOLLOWING THE SOUND

KIYOSHI SUGITA: FOLLOWING THE SOUND (2023)

Emotional encounters of three people

Matthew Joseph Jenner reports in International Cinephile Society: "The film focuses on a trio of characters, each distinct from one another, being drawn together by chance. Whether nurturing a new relationship between them or revisiting the past when they previously encountered one another (in one of the most emotionally resonant moments in the film), we see the deep connections that bind these people together." James Hadfield's review in The Japan Times. comments: "This obliqueness is both a strength and weakness for Following the Sound. Even compared to his previous work, Sugita leaves things wide open to interpretation here — and I have to confess that the film didn’t draw me in to the same extent as Haruhara-san’s Recorder. However, there’s no denying the emotional charge of the final scene. Just let me get back to you about what the heck it means."

Evidently, this film relates closely to Sugita's previous one, and refers to grieving. Haru (An Ogawa), has lost her mother (though as an adolescent), and still goes around with a little cassette player listening to tapes her mother made. Haru who has a pale, round, open face, approaches Yukiko (Yuko Namamura), asking her for help in directions to a cafe. Yukiko helps, but the cafe is closed. So Yukiko invites Haru to her house for lunch. If this were a film by Korean NYFF favorite Hong Sang-soo, there would be a lot of conversation. But with Sugita, people don't talk much. Sometimes the meaning is in everyday actions performed wordlessly. Preparing an omelette and eating an omelette may be all you get. What else is going on, as the Japan Times reviewer James Hadfield points out, is only hinted at, and Sugita is "awfully coy" about what the exact details are. But the emotional charge is there, and the overtone is of loss and grief.

Without a lot of conversation, Haru and Yukiko nonetheless clearly bond, and they go on a motorcycle trip to find a place, the sound of a stream or river, recorded by Haru's mother. The journey would seem to be for Haru's benefit, but Yukiko says "No, I’m being helped by you." Haru is a forerunner in grief, and now a teacher.

Haru also seems to be following a middle-aged man around, Tsuyoshi (Hidekazu Mashima). He responds by coming to the bookstore where Haru works, and the two of them go to a cafe where she acknowledges that they have met before. Tsoyoshi seems shocked by this reminder because of how they met. The plot summary will tell you: she stopped Tsoyoshi from jumping in front of a train. Meanwhile Haru and her friends, as Hadfield puts it, "dabble in rudimentary filmmaking," shooting little ordinary scenes with small video cameras. And Haru is in an art workshop for this, and also at one point a figure drawing class, where an older woman accuses her of staring at her instead of the model. There is also a project to make up a little play with ordinary events and speeches, which the characters see successfully performed, which they celebrate with a beer.

Eventually Haru, Yukiko and Tsuyushi wind up together. But this not the kind of film where conventional plot developments matter so much as the emotions, and the emotions are strong and evident from the start. It is an interesting watch, and Sugita is a filmmaker of evident sensitivity who plays by his own rules which we may still be figuring out. I feel more comfortable, and more rewarded, by the way Hong Sang-soo uses cafes than the way they are used here, but Following the Sound may reveal new layers on repeated viewings. Kiyoshi Sugita was an assistant director for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shinji Aoyama, Nobuhiro Suwa and others. This is his fourth feature.

Following the Sound,m 88 mins., debuted in Giornate degli Autori at Venice Sept. 2023. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts (Jul. 10-21).

[Chris Knipp]

NORIKO YUASA: PERFORMING KAORU'S FUNERAL (2023)

A lot goes on after you're dead

This appears to be Noriko Yuasa's feature film debut after short films and TV series, or at least her first big one. It's a complicated, ambitious film. The focus is as the title suggests a Japanese funeral with elaborate celebration and grieving ceremonies, drunkenness, angry outbursts, fakery, confusion, and a designated "chief mourner" who is an ex-husband, Jun (Koji Seki). You would need a deep understanding of Japanese language, culture, and traditions to follow this, to know whether it's being "dark" or "darkly humorous" or just serious; whether spot-on, or sometimes a misfire. Any intelligent moviegoer who can read subtitles can obviously see in general what's going on. But honestly, you'll be lost most of the time. There are too many shifts of tone, too many square-ratio, golden-tinted flashbacks, some long years ago, some as recent as yesterday, or Covid, to follow confidently.

Maybe we're meant to be lost, as is Jun. He gets a message, "Kagimino, Okayama Prefecture: Tachibana Funeral Parlor will organize everything." It seems from flashbacks well past midway that his marriage to Kaoru was was a sweet, youthful one that took place years ago, and quite brief (its cause seems to be depicted, but I didn't understand what it was). It is only here, well past midway, that Jun starts to realize he's not just the designated "chief mourner," a performer in a pretty empty collective ritual involving a lot of people he doesn't know, but actually has something to mourn himself, someting poignant indeed. Wasn't this actually his first, great love? May not its quick demise be seen as the tragedy of his life?

Kaoru - the recently dead one: there are several others, including a fussy bespectacled schoolgirl and a pretty young woman - was barely forty, it appears, and pretty, and was hit by a truck, and died. She has been exquitely embalmed. We glimpse that, especially the painting and plastering over of her face into a mask of beautiful perfection that is frequently revealed. And then some drunken guy slides the coffin lid back (yes, it slides, like a traditional Japanese door) and pours wine down on her. What is that about? Though Yumasa sticks mostly to convention, she seems unable to resist flashy, extreme moments like this, or like the old man who gets drunk and violent and causes a big disturbance in an initial dinner party; or late in the game, the mud-slinging battle between Jun and the young bespectacled schoolgirl Kaoru. The overall effect is theatrical, not subtle, in a genre to which the most complex, subtle, and deeply moving films in all of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, belongs.

Perhaps this thatricality is appropriate, since Kaoru was a screenwriter; and it may be an ironic, intentional embarrassment for Jun to be chief mourner, since he is just a would-be actor, who works as a driver for call girls in Tokyo. All this happens down in the small village in Okayama that Kaoru comes from. Here, there may be producers and other theatrical and movie people who have come, but this is not the time and place for them to be useful to Jun. And they're not of much use to us, either, because we don't know who they are or what their stories are either. The writer, Takato Nishi, and the filmmaker should have collaborated on something more sharply focused and clearly directed. They seem to have been swamped by their own ambition in this good-looking but shapeless film.

[i]Performing Kaoru's Funersl カオルの葬式, 101 mins., won the Japan Cuts award at the 2024 Osaka Asian Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 Japan Cuts series, NYC (Jul. 10-21).

[Chris Knipp]

JUNKO SUNKURADA, TOMOKO TABATA, AND KIICHI NAKAI IN MOVING

SHINJI SÔMAI: MOVING (1993)

A twelve-year-old girl in early-Nineties Japan confronts her parents' separation

A guide to Shinji Sômai from BFI

About the rerelease from Hollywood Reporter

Josh Slater-Williams, BFI: "Critic Shigehiko Hasumi once suggested that Japanese filmmaker Shinji Somai – who died young aged 53 in 2001, after directing 13 features – 'is the missing link between the end of the studio system of Japan and the rise of independent filmmaking.' In their compassionate depictions of loneliness and alienation, you can certainly see the influence of Somai’s films in the works of several younger directors who followed, including Shunji Iwai (All About Lily Chou-Chou) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse). . . So why is Somai relatively unknown in the west?"

Certainly much of Moving has a freshness, simplicity, and directness that set it apart from recent Japanese films - as is appropriate being from the point of view of a cheerful, plucky, but somewhat naive girl of twelve or so whose parents separate. The father of twelve-year-old Ren (the impressive Tomoko Tabata) suddenly moves out. She tries to pretend nothing has changed, and for a while nothing does. Eventully her schoolmates just know what's happened because she's different (and she's not the only one, though there's no support group here); it doesn't matter if they're divorced or separated. Something is "wrong," the wholeness of the traditional family unit has been broken.

Everything is from Ren's point of view throughout, and the girl's (and Tomoko Tabata's) energy seems indomitable. They sit at a thin, triangular dinner table, a will-chosen piece of decor that already communicates this family's rejection of traditional norms and the "angular," cranky relations among them, where the child holds equal weight. Ren corrects her father's table manners. She's parenting her parents, and wonders if her "Oto-San" will be able to manage on his own. Then her mother gets drunk and Ren worries about the impression this will make on the neighbors, not because she's conventional, but because she's more grownup.

It's a while before her unstoppable good cheer begins to falter, though she's often obstreperous. Her parents are too: this is part of the fun and the freshness of the film: the parents are also childish, perhaps more so, because in this modern world, they fail to maintain the discipline of traditional customs and pretend they are free to go their own way. Nobody really is.

The film is a portrait of the early Nineties, a moment in Japan when couples were beginning to regard it as acceptable to divorce or separate simply for their own reasons. The economic bubble has burst, and every adult is responsible for being financially independent. Ren's mother has gone from not working to dressing up and going out to work at a good job. "Marriage is survival of the fittest”, Renko’s mom Nazuna (Junko Sakurada) later exclaims. Kenichi (Kiichi Nakai), her boyish, slightly goofy dad, has worked at home and partly played house-husband.

The roles are all confused: both parents are living by a new order but complaining that things aren't as they used to be. Ren learns family friend Yukio (Taro Tanaka), on whom she'd had an innocent childish crush, is engaged to be married, and his fiancée is unsure whether she wants to have the child. As they wander around on the scene of Ren's house it almost seems they're a surrogate family - but not one that provides stability, either.

All this confusing grownup and newfangled stuff is seen both starkly and from a distance, because we get it from Ren's point of view. Most importantly, Ren eventually becomes so confused she wonders out loud - she often asks questions out loud, by herself - why she was even born. But remember, she is still just a young girl, and all these things are external and not quite real to her.

The climax, still full of the film's initial energy but risky, because Somai doesn't know where to go with it, comes when Ren carries out a gesture that takes on literally the adult role and attempts to change things: she wants to have the three of them reunite once a week, no, maybe only once a month, but for now she takes her mother's credit card and buys reservations at a hotel by Lake Biwa, where they've been bfore, and travel there. This takes place, and then she goes off on her own, wandering into the safe, if comically confused and befuddled protection of a white-bearded and traditionally dressed old man, and thence off into the fire and energy of a local festival whose explosions are beautiful, intoxicating, and unreal. Kenichi, her father, turns up at the hotel: but this only seems to underline, for us as well as for Ren, that it's finished, which she already knew from her classmates.

It's amazing all that happens in this film as well as how clear-headed yet ultimately heartbreaking is its image of the dissolution of a marriage from the POV of an adolescent. But when the film gets into the festival, and Ren wanders off by herself, Somai loses the thread, and the action starts soft-peddling too much. Still, the vibrancy of individual scenes is unmistakeable and the realization of the character of the young girl is terrifically engaging.

Moving お引越し, 123 mins.,debuted at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, 1993. Numerous awards; 2023 Winner Venezia Classici Award
Best Restored Film. Revival screened for this review from 2024 Japan Cuts (Jul. 10-21).

[Chris Knipp]

TOSHIHIKO TANAKA IN REI

TOSIHIKO TANAKA: REI (2024)

Seeking love in Tokyo and the Hokkaido snows

Rei refers to a genderless given name, a Japanese kanji character that only gains meaning when joined with other kanji. ("Pair.") This is presented before the film begins and in the middle of it. The implication must be that another person can "complete" you. But that doesn't prove true in this overlong melodrama, which is tarnished by a retro attitude toward disability: that and its long run-time as Wendy Ide says in her Screen Daily Rotterdam review, make this film unlikely to succeed in international theaters, despite its top Rotterdam Tiger Award and how absorbing it is in parts. A small child with learning disabilities and a grown man who is deaf are important characters and it is the way they and their effect on people around them are treated that is troubling and unsatisfactory.

Asari parents Hira, the small child, but it a burden that weighs terribly upon her. She is best friends with Hikari, a successful single woman in a design business, who encounters the deaf Masato (writer-director-producer Toshhiko Tanaka, who has a striking, youthful face) when she admires his photographs in theater brochures: she goes to plays a lot and seeks him out to do photos of her. She also gets involved with a lead actor in the plays. A scene where the actor, who says he has slost his passion and is quitting acting, tries to make Hikari recite for him a speech from King Lear is one of the most painfully overwrought moments of the film.

But it is Masato - sexy and mysterious as played by director Tanaka - whom Hikari follows to snowy Hokkaido, leading to a dramatic collapse in a blizzard and many beautiful landscape shots where dp Ikeda Akio’s cinematography shines. In fact, Masato is a photographer of landscape, not portraits. But he starts taking his big camera and shooting people later on, almost as a weapon, after a male admirer cuts him off from Hikari and he becomes frustrated and deeranged.

Masato has never bothered to learn sign language. When Hikari gets interested she studies it and finds out no, you can only communicate with him by email, handwritten notes, or maybe mental telepathy. There is little suggestion here that deafness or learning disability can be dealt with successfully or logically. Everything is impressionistic.

Poor little Hira exists only as a problem, by which her father justifies having an affair with a nurse who cared for Masato's mother in her dying days. Her mother doesn't want to put her in a special needs school, but that doesn't go well.

Hikari's own "problem" is that she has no problems, never has had them, of health or otherwise. Dissatisfied with her perfect life (but without a man), she sees herself as "transparent," or a blank. It is she who is the genderless letter needing to be completed.

But Hikari doesn't succeed; no one does. Each of the main characters of Rei at one point or another declares themself hopeless. Even Masato tries to speak late in the film to clumsily shout "I wish I was never born."

James Hadfield says in his Japan Times review that this film is a gift of Covid, because the theater people who made it did so when the theaters were closed due to the pandemic. He says "there’s a palpable, go-for-broke energy to this underdog production, as if everyone involved realized they might not get another chance." There is something exciting about the complexity of the plotting and the raging feelings, the extravagant love affair with a deaf man, but it all starts to burn itself out before the three-plus hours are over. The filmmaker reportedly said at a screening that the script was finished in ten days. He gives Hamaguchi as an influence: I feared as much from the outset. What Hamaguchi does is not necessarily a good template. But a review comments that "the echoes of Happy Hour and Drive My Car are plain for all to see." Tanaka has also said he wants viewers of his film to notice its depiction of landscape and the seasons and their effect on people and their moods, and this is what's best about it.

Rei莉の対 , 189 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Jan. 25, 2024, where it won the Tiger award. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 New York Japan Cuts series (Jul. 10-21).

[Chris Knipp]

POSTER FOR SAYONARA, GIRLS.

SHUN NAKAGAWA: SAYONARA, GIRLS. (2023)

Graduating high school seniors wrestle with conflict and trauma

Adapted from a series of short stories by Asai Ryo, the film’s Japanese title is the more cryptic "girls don’t graduate" hinting at how hard it is to leave adolescence behind. The focus is on the day before and graduation day itself at a rural high school, Shimada High School in Yamanashi Prefecture. In keeping with the well known Japanese shyness and restraint, the action here tends to be conspicuously lacking in passion or overt displays of affection. Reviews have commented on the blandness. Nonetheless sentimentality reins: to make sure, the school itself is scheduled to be demolished, so the kids will never be able to return to the physical facility. And they keep saying they don't want to graduate. This is a somewhat wan effort. That doesn't mean it has nothing to say or isn't touching

You may have been shy too, and sympathize with Shiori (Tomo Nakai) the super-timid girl whose school days have been torture, her one support the school librarian, with whom she has a long chat in which he reveals he was just the same. He urges her to push herself, which she does, and returns later to show him a bunch of yearbook greetings classmates have penned for her, after all.

Another breakthrough is the sweethearts who have a fight on the way to school on graduation day because Kyoko (Rina Komiyama) has chosen to go to Tokyo for school to train to be a therapist while he is staying to attend a local training program, become a schoolteacher and coach basketball. He can't forgive her: but later he apologies and they have a sweet reconciliation.

The graduation includes "Pomp and Circumstance," which we glimpse, but a bigger focus is the planned performance of student musical groups, and the girl in charge of that, music club leader Yuki (Rina Ono) struggles with conflicts. A costumed lip-synch-only band called Heaven's Gate has won a vote, making them the final, climactic performance at graduation, but they are saying their win is a mockery because the students agreed to vote for them as a joke, and they refuse to perform. Then their makeup and instruments and equipment (which they don't know how to play anyway) are all stolen. At the last minute another girl reveals she has done it because she's admired the voice of the lead singer since junior high. He'll have to perform a cappella, and everyone will get to hear his nice voice. In the event he does do a creditable, if a bit slow, rendition of "Danny Boy" and gets an ovation.

These tales are all woven in and overlap in the editing. A more troubling element is Manami (Yuumi Kawai), a technical school candidate who, since she had fewer academic challenges to deal with, has been chosen to give the valedictorian address, but is struggling with the traumatic memory of a beloved boy called Shun (like the filmmaker) who (spoiler alert) has fallen to his death. When the moment comes, at the podium, she stands speechless. Later (spoiler) she meets with a fantasy Shun, whom she sees is cold (as he would be, since he's dead) and gives him her too-small school uniform jacket to warm him. They sit down on the gym floor and she reads her speech to him. Alas, it is simply a mass of clichés.

There is talk of Carrie earlier, but pop cultural references or light heartedness of any kind are limited. The kids all wear school uniform: matching jackets for girls and boys, long striped rep ties for the boys, foulard bows for the girls. Interestingly, they file their shoes outside classrooms and wear special foot covers inside (see photo). I liked that the boys' trousers are tartan. But that they don't dress up specially for graduation is a letdown. Someone remarks it's a pity they don't have a "prom," like an American high school.

There are lots of busy, lively enough young extras doing convincing ensemble work. On the other hand, the number of characters identified by name is limited for an ensemble piece like this. One thinks of how vivid and interconnected the cast is in the Norwegian series "Skam," or the strong presence of characters in the great John Hughes youth pictures of the Eighties. One doesn't want to call Sayonara, Girls lackluster. It has too effective a cumulative emotional effect for that. But as high school genre pictures go, it has its inevitable limitations and lacks the charm and flair of Hollywood youth pics at their best. But this feels very, very Japanese.

Sayonara, Girls.少女は卒業しない ("The Girl Never Graduates"), 120 mins., debuted at Tokyo Oct. 26, 2022; also Beijing Apr. 24, 2023. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 New York Japan Cuts series (Jul. 10-21).


A CLASSROOM MOMENT IN SAYONARA, GIRLS.

[Chris Knipp]

SHINSUKE AOKI (LEFT) IN AUGUST IN THE WATER

GAKURYÜ ISHII: AUGUST IN THE WATER (1995)

Teenage lovers glimpse apocalyptic futures

Strange incidents happen to Izumi (Rena Komine), a young diving star transferred from another school now united with a new boyfriend, Mao (Shinsuke Aoki). During a competition, Izumi falls from a high pltform and sinks to the bottom of the pool. Mao jumps in and rescues her. She is hospitalized in a coma. Soon she comes out, but changed. This revival from thirty years ago is a quaint and charming and ultimately amazingly beautiful mixture of fantasy, science fiction, cosmic mysticism, teen romance, coming of age, and ecological parable. This is pointed out in a discussion of the film on Screen Anarchy by Niels Matthijs, and others. The mix of image and sound is world-class here and Gakuryû Ishii is a discovery for those of us who hadn't heard of him.

In the film, water starts running out, even though there is still plenty of water in the pool where its impressive diving platforms where Izumi fell. People start dropping down in the street (and people ignore them) and their organs turn to stone (the "stone disease"), which seems to be the result of the two meteorites that crash improbably, on a mountain very close together from very remote distances apart in space. What has happened to Izumi? Does she have new wisdom implanted in her from a remote galaxy?

One writer (Coeval Magazine), who provides a plethora of stills, sums up events with "Isuku’s town is in cosmic trouble: an oracle in the form of a proto-Internet zodiac app predicts problems on the pastel-colored horizon.' So there is that, too; and Izumi consults astrology books.

Rather than any impressive special effects, AUgust in the Water is memorable for its prolonged sequence of girls performing in a high-level diving competition, and also for its traditional festival with men bare-assed huddled together pushing through the streets. When Izumi is recognized as having special knowledge, a group of experts, and the handsome boyfriend, sit together facing a big, high up Sony television set watching Izumi. Remember when those big Sony TV's were the state of the art?

A website called Onderhond Movie Meter calls August in the Water as one of Ishii's "hidden gems" that is "yet to be discovered even by most fans." While Ishii is known as a master of Japanese punk cinema, full of dirt and mess, this is something different, peacefull, beautiful and haunting, and a mix, as the writer says "part romance, part fantasy, part sci-fi and part coming of age with some meandering philosophy [thrown] in."

The Coeval writer sums up: "Ecocriticism inflected with coming-of-age romance, August in the Water is a new-age love story from the precipice of a new millennium. With a haunting minimal vaporwave score by Hiroyuki Onogawa, Ishii’s film offers a touching answer to the alienation of teenage girlhood." Yes, "from the precipice of a new millennium," this seemingly dated charmer also looks into the future and has a nice score accompanying a great mixture of pleasing images. For a revival, it's a worthy, unexpected selection that may suggest films as far apart as Donnie Darko, Godard's Alphaville and Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.

At the end things turn around and the rains come, and what rains they are: it's a magnificent sequence, just one of several here that reveals Ishii to be a remarkable filmmaker, though from the descriptions, he has various styles, and this is not his most typical one (perhaps his 2023 The Box Man, also in this year's Japan Cuts, is more typical). Recommended.

August in the Water 水の中の八月, 117 mins., premiered in Japan Sept. 9, 1995. Festivals: Goteberg Feb. 2, 1996; Brussels Mar. 1996; Pusan Sept. 1996; San Sebastian, Singapore, UK, Taiwan, Germany. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 New York Japan Cuts series (Jul. 10-21).