Tag: corpse

River’s Edge (Ribazu Ejji)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A Tokyo high school. Haruna Wakakusa (Fumi Nikaido) is seeing Kannonzaki (Shuhei Uesugi) but not sleeping with him. So behind her back Kannonzaki looks around for someone more compliant and finds Rumi Koyama (Shiori Doi) who, with the aid of a line of coke or two, is as enthusiastic about having sex as he is.

Kannonzaki is also a bully who frequently targets the quiet Ichiro Yamada (Ryo Yoshizara) with whom Haruna strikes up a friendship. Despite the fact of his dating Kanna Tajima (Aoi Morikawa), more as a cover than anything else, Ichiro is actually gay.

Ichiro is full of surprises. He’s raising a couple of kittens in a cardboard box outside a local building and deigns to show Haruna his “hidden treasure”, a skeletal corpse lying in the reeds near the river that runs through the city. He’s only shared this secret with one other person, Kozue Yoshikawa (Sumire), who takes time off from school as a working child model for photo shoots. She’s also a binge eater who throws up after overeating, thus maintaining her figure.

When a rumour spreads that there may be money buried in the reeds, Ichiro enlists Haruna and Kozue to help him bury the corpse so that none of school’s treasure hunters will discover it.

As much as the movie is shown from any one character’s point of view, it’s Haruna’s. But it’s a film punctuated by character vox pops, as if it were a documentary, wherein a character is responding to questions both trivial and large. The large questions leave most of the characters with nothing to say.

There are also hints of plot to come, as for example with Haruna’s explaining in an early vox pop why she saved her teddy bear from a fire, an event which doesn’t occur until the closing minutes, although then we only see its aftermath and that only briefly. These little interviews to camera appear to have been conducted long after the events depicted have taken place.

Although it contains graphic scenes of teen sex as well as occasional bursts of violence, this is primarily a drama about teenagers relating to one another in a world where adults, while they impinge on it, are outsiders and never more than minor characters. It’s based on a manga by Kyoko Okazaki.

The characters remain fascinating throughout and if a variety of relationships straight and gay are to be found both within and on the fringes of the proceedings, at its core this concerns a deep friendship between a straight girl and a gay boy. There’s something really refreshing about that.

River’s Edge played in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) in 2018, when this piece was originally written. Available on Netflix in March. Watch the film trailer (Japanese, no subtitles) below:

A Ghost Story

Posted on by mjbstaging

A couple lives in a house. He dies and returns as a ghost (a person with a sheet over his head) she can’t see. She stays for a bit then moves out. Other people come and go. He stays, he waits.

Initially M (Rooney Mara) wants to move somewhere else, but C (Casey Affleck) rather likes the house and wants to stay. After his death, she identifies his body in the morgue then spends some time with his mortal remains. Later, his corpse gets up matter of factly, sheet and all, and leaves. To return to their house. Before moving out, she scribbles a note on a small piece of paper, folds it in to a tiny square and pushes it into a door frame. He tries repeatedly to extract this note to see what it says. We want to know, too.

Time moves on but C doesn’t. He attempts to scare a resident mum and her children by hurling kitchen plates at them in an uncharacteristic loss of self-control. He listens to a man at a party pontificate on the meaning of life in terms of what we leave behind. He waves at the (person under a floral patterned sheet) ghost in the house next door. Eventually the houses are demolished and the site is built upon. He goes back in time to watch the settlers who built the first house.

Some very long takes include one of the bereaved M violently stuffing herself with a pie then throwing up. The 4:3 frame with rounded edges throughout recalls projected photographic slides and home movies of yesteryear. Odder still are the noises off which M and the pre-ghost C get out of bed to investigate although they can find nothing. We’re never quite sure what we’re doing in this house or why we’re watching this couple in their very private, home space. We might be some strange, unearthly presence. Such as a ghost.

All of which is thoroughly compelling to experience or just to watch. As M drops out of the film, you’ll find yourself wondering what C’s ghost is still doing there, why hasn’t he just vanished at death or gone on to whatever place we go to when we die. If the film ponders such questions, it never attempts to impose easy answers. That lends it an incredible power.

C’s death is violent but we see only its peaceful aftermath. There is violence however in both their lives: M’s violent eating reflects C’s when we eventually see him eat in flashback. His violent outburst with the kitchen plates suggests something latent in his character but elsewhere he seems relaxed. The violence expresses a pent up frustration lurking beneath. What matters in life? What happens if it’s suddenly cut short? What exactly do we leave behind us?

A Ghost Story was out in cinemas in August 11th, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on all major VoD platforms in February 2018.

Click here for another film meditation on death.