Tag: Japan

Dreams on Fire

Posted on by Paul Risker

The metaphor about the danger of playing with fire is a familiar one to us all. In Canadian filmmaker Philippe McKie’s Japanese urban dance film, the dangerous flames are those that emerge from daring to dream. It’s a spirited tale of the fragility and strength of hope. The title even has an apt double-meaning because fire is a force of destruction, but in the context of the pursuit of one’s dreams, it can be symbolic of a life illuminated by the transformative flames of success.

The young dreamer in this tale is Yume (Bambi Naka), who rebukes her father’s instructions and runs away to Tokyo to become a dancer. The difficult reality of achieving success soon sets in, and penniless, she finds work as a hostess in Tokyo’s red-light district. She continues to study and integrate herself into the dance community, never giving up on her dream.

From the beginning we feel we’re in the company of a storyteller brimming with confidence, who is unapologetic for his vision. Dreams on Fire will not please everyone, and there will be those that will accuse it of being an aspirational story that saunters, failing to explore deeper themes and ideas. This is to perhaps miss the filmmaker’s intention. A stylised story, it’s an unrestrained love letter to the aspirational journey that he chooses to not weigh down. He pays tribute to the arduous pursuit his protagonist undertakes, and the storyteller and character are not completely divisible from one another, as he concludes a significant step in his own creative journey.

At an 120-minutes it’s not short, and what struck me was a moment when I realised the passage of time that had come and gone. Thinking about our own lives, we lose sight of time, coming to realise that it’s passing us by of its own volition. In hindsight, our experiences are not necessarily what we pictured in our mind, and this is true for Yume. Finding a brevity in the time the story covers provokes a feeling that while we’ve been following her, we’ve been lost in a trance.

Emphasising the focus on the human body and its movement, the choreography of a single or group of bodies becomes hypnotic. Watching the young woman dedicated to training her body, perfecting her craft draws us in, and nestles us into the fierce ambition where perhaps dance is more important than life itself. While the world continues to move around her, it feels that she’s on her own plane of existence. The dance and music set pieces add a dreamy layer to the trance like feel, that in one scene conveys a deep eroticism, and in another a surreal nightmare.

A single viewing of Dreams on Fire is not enough, it requires a second viewing to see through this trance, to see clearly what she feels, when she feels it, how and when the journey takes shape.

Ironically, Bambi Naka plays the young and aspirational protagonist, who herself knows what it is to have this dream. Alongside her then romantic partner Aya Sato, she was one half of the duo AyaBambi, the lead dancers for Madonna on a two-year world tour. She plays Yume with a vulnerable shadow, even as she finds confidence and sheds her meekness. When another dancer she replaces in an ensemble warns her about the peril of injury, we find ourselves intermittently holding our breath. We realise that the smallest misstep, whether dancing or not could be disastrous, and we fear for her fragile dream.

Dreams on Fire is about characters on the fringes, but it’s not a cold or lonely space. While she lives in a bare and cramped apartment, she’s integrating herself into a community full of life. The harsher reality would be denying herself a chance at her dreams by remaining at home. With an optimistic eye, McKie shows the warmth of belonging to the fringes. A mature piece of storytelling, it does not play to either the saccharine or cold cynicism, instead it honours that joy and the sorrow go together.

If the film is a love letter to Tokyo, the Canadian filmmaker’s spiritual home having left film school in Montreal to spend 10 years living and working there, for us it’s neither a love letter to a city, nor any fringe culture. For western audiences it’s a look into the Japanese urban dance scene, that only scratches the surface of this cultural phenomenon, and other Japanese subcultures. As an unrestrained love letter to the aspirational journey, it’s also an expression that life is an empty shell we must fill with purpose and meaning, that exposes us to both the fragility and the strength of hope.

Dreams on Fire premiered in March at Glasgow Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It shows at the Fantasia International Film Festival (in Quebec) in August.

Bloodline (Hyeol-maek)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Widower of some three years standing Kim An-dong (Kim Seung-ho) has done alright for himself in the mining business in Hokkaido, but now it’s after the Second World War, the occupying Japanese have been thrown out of Korea and he’s come back to Seoul where he lives with his grown up son Kim Geo-buk (Shin Seong-il, the lead in A Day Off, Lee Man-hee, 1968, and a huge Korean star).

The Kims are one of three families in a ramshackle set of basic houses sharing a courtyard. Ggangtong (Choi Nam-hyun) lives with his wife Ongmae (Hwang Jung-seun) and daughter Bok-sun (Um Aing-ran) to whom Geo-buk has taken a shine. Ggangtong’s first wife having died, Ongmae is the girl’s stepmother and is teaching her to sing bar songs so she can make herself and the girl’s father a lot of money via prostitution. The girl is understandably upset about this and instead goes out with Geo-buk to sell socks to soldiers at the nearby U.S. Army base where his dad, seeing the Americans as the most secure source of income in the area, wants him to get a job. Sitting by the railway at night, the young couple talk about getting work in the textile factory at Yeongdeungpo as a possible route out of their economic troubles.

The third family comprises two brothers, one married, one unmarried. The older Won-pal (Shin Young-kyun) makes a meagre living out of scavenging bomb parts left over from the war. His wife (Lee Kyoung-hee), meanwhile, is extremely ill but Won-pal has no money to pay any doctor to even examine her, let alone find a cure, so she lies on the floor all day, barely moving. There’s a suggestion that the physical disabilities of both his wife and young daughter (Lee Gyeong-rim) have been caused by his ill-judged attempts to make money.

Won-pal‘s younger brother Won-chil (Choi Moo-ryong) went to university in Japan and has come back with the desire to write novels, “as if that’s going to put anything on the table”, as his infuriated older brother comments. When Won-chil is around, the pair seem to argue constantly. Their mother (Song Mi-nam) takes refuge in singing Christian hymns, citing Jesus’ words about “in my father’s house are many mansions” – pretty ironic given the family’s cramped housing conditions. If any other members of the family share her faith, they don’t show it.

Won-chil has been trying to find paying work – but nothing has come of it. He’s also having problems with the girl he likes, Ok-hui (Kim Ji-mee). To survive, she is having a relationship with an American soldier since the G.I.s seem to be the only people around with a decent income. Meanwhile, one Madam Hwasan interests An-dong in buying from her a 29 year old potential bride, a refugee who has come down from the North (where the Chinese communists are in power). The economy is on its knees and the sex trade in its various forms seems to be one of the few areas that’s flourishing economically.

There is a bright light on the horizon, however, in that the young couple eventually get jobs at the textile factory and are seen as facing an optimistic future together, so much so that Geo-buk writes to ask both fathers to come and visit them there. It’s as if the film is trying to paint a rosy picture of Korea going forward, particularly through its young, post-war generation. There’s a lot of darkness here, but the country is going to move out of it and everything’s going to be all right. After some of the bleak material earlier, you wonder if the happy ending is just that little bit too pat. Nevertheless as a picture of the immediate post-war period in Korea made about a decade and a half later on, it serves as fascinating viewing today.

The film is also known under the English title Kinship.

Bloodline plays Regent Street Cinema, 03 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Book here. Watch the Festival trailer below:

Earthquake Bird

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tokyo, 1989. An American woman who’s not long been in Japan has disappeared and the last person to see her alive is Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) who has lived in the country for five years, two months. Lucy is hauled in for questioning by the police and as her life in Japan slowly reveals itself in flashback, it becomes apparent why they want to talk to her.

Lucy is quiet, reserved, introverted. She mostly keeps herself to herself. She fits in well in Japanese society with its emphasis on the importance of the group over the individual. She is fluent in Japanese and works as a translator. She plays cello in an amateur string quartet with three much older Japanese women.

She also socialises with a group of international expats which is where Bob (Jack Huston) introduces her to the woman about whom the police wish to question her, Lily Bridges (Riley Keough) who is working as a nurse. The two women possess very different personalities. Lucy might be foolish to agree to take the newly arrived foreigner under her wing and show her the ropes. Lily is the stereotypical American: brash, outgoing and nosy. Not someone you imagine adapting well to Japanese society. She doesn’t even speak the language.

Lucy’s life changes when she runs into a man taking photographs on the street. He claims not to be interested in photographing people, only buildings, water, reflections. Something hooks her. Teiji Matsuda (Naoki Kobayashi) works at a noodle restaurant, but amateur photography is his passion. Soon she’s regularly going back to his flat, strangely situated at the top of an exterior spiral staircase and fully equipped as a darkroom, to be photographed. When on one occasion she removes her top, he tells her that wasn’t what he wanted. Before long, however, the pair have entered into a full-on, physical relationship.

She becomes obsessed with the photographs of old girlfriends Teiji keeps locked away in a filing cabinet. She knows where the key is and takes a look. When he later finds out, he is not pleased. Lily, meanwhile, wants to meet the boyfriend and when she does is clearly attracted to Teiji. This classic love triangle setup is fuelled by the growing tension between Lucy and Teiji.

Much as it would like to play like a Japanese thriller, Earthquake Bird is the adaptation of an English novel and it doesn’t feel very Japanese – despite a great quantity of Japanese dialogue, much of it delivered by Vikander. (To her credit, for this film she had to learn both the Japanese language and playing the cello, the latter something she’d learned a little as a child.) That said, as an outsider’s view of Japan, it’s convincing enough. And it has to have something of a grasp of Japanese culture and the country’s mindset to work.

When the police initially question Lucy, they do so in second-rate English until they discover she’s fluent in Japanese, something she doesn’t initially reveal. This seems to be typical of the woman. She is beset by guilt for an incident in her pre-Japan past for which she rightly or wrongly believes herself responsible.

For those wondering about the title, it relates to a bird that, as Teiji explains to Lucy, if you listen carefully, can be quietly heard to sing following an earthquake. There are several small-scale literal earthquakes in the narrative, that are soon over without any ill after effects. And then there are minor earthquake-comparable incidents, like a violinist from the string quartet slipping down steps to her death, to the shame of her fellow player who has recently polished the stairs and fears she may be responsible for the accident. Or Lucy falling ill when she, Teiji and Lily go on a day trip to Sado Island.

The whole is visually arresting throughout, with top-notch cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon who shot Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook, 2016) and production design by Yohei Tanada who also did ManHunt (John Woo, 2017) and The Third Murder (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2017), so while you could wait a couple of weeks for it to turn up on Netflix, you might enjoy it more if you see it on the big screen first. As you might expect from Wash Westmoreland, previously the co-writer-director behind Still Alice (2014) and Colette (2018), this is as much character and culture study as it is thriller, which may infuriate some but reward those with the patience to take it on its own terms.

Earthquake Bird is out in the UK on Friday, November 1st. On Netflix in March!

To The Ends Of The Earth (Tabi No Owari Sekai No Hajimari)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) is a TV journalist working with a production company trying to find magazine format stories as they travel around Uzbekistan. None of them speak Uzbek, so they rely on a local interpreter Temur (Adiz Rajabov). When not shooting, Yoko explores the local city.

The prodigious Kiyoshi Kurosawa is best known for his horror films Cure (1997) and Pulse/Kairo (2001) yet has dabbled in a wide variety of genres. This one is, for want of a better description, a travelogue with a hint of a musical. The heroine desperately wants to be a singer, but has found herself in the job of roving TV presenter – not exactly what she wanted to do, but it’s certainly show business. She wonders if she’s lost her way. Her boyfriend Ryo who we never see is a firefighter working back at Tokyo harbour with whom she periodically communicates by text.

Among the magazine segments she and the crew are required to shoot are trying to catch a legendary two metre fish (which they never find) at a lake, a fairground ride which turns the rider upside down over and over and a restaurant where she must sample the local cuisine on camera and extol its virtues even though it hasn’t been cooked properly. She contributes one idea that comes off, involving freeing a goat from its urban pen into the wild.

Outside of shooting, she wanders out and explores the local urban landscape. She catches a bus to a local bazaar, a fairly hair-raising experience for a foreigner who doesn’t speak the local language. In the bazaar, her foreign looks, slight Japanese frame and short skirt attracts the gaze of males not used to seeing such things among the local female populace. At dusk, she hurries through streets, alleyways and underpasses where groups of men are gathered.

On another occasion, she follows the sound of a female singing opera (Mimi’s Song from La Bohème) which leads her into a building and through a series of exquisitely decorated rooms into a vast space where the woman is singing… and thence into an actual stage auditorium where she herself can sing Edith Piaf’s Hymne à l’amour, one of the lines of which is referenced in the film’s title.

After the shoot’s director has decided he’s had enough of shooting the magazine material, which isn’t producing particularly good results, Yoko is given a portable camera and told to try shooting some segments herself. She starts with another bazaar but before long is fleeing from cops who accuse her of filming in an unauthorised area.

Most of Kurosawa’s films to date have been shot in his native Japan with Japanese cast and crew. Before this film, rare exceptions included Daguerrotype (2016), shot in France with a French crew, and Seventh Code (2013) in Vladivostock. Like the latter, To The Ends Of The Earth employs a Japanese cast and crew in foreign locations and feels quite different from anything else the director has done. The Uzbek locations seem to dictate very different camera setups and pacing.

Yet it feels at once familiar to those used to the director’s style of films. Those not wishing to look beyond such genres as horror or science fiction may not be happy, but those who like what he does regardless of whether or not it fits an established genre are in for a real treat.

To The Ends Of The Earth played in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) of 2019, when this piece was originally written. It’s on Mubi in November (2020). Watch the film trailer below:

Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The nuclear family. Dad Osamu (Lily Franky) takes son Shota (Jyo Kairi) to a local convenience store where, through a series of long rehearsed routines, they steal a series of items. Just another day of getting by.

Mum Nobuyo (Ando Sakura), a former sex worker, dispenses advice to her younger sister Aki (Mayu Matsuoka) – who gets fired from a club where girls display themselves in various states of dress and undress to clients through one way mirrors. Basically, she’s been caught sticking her hands in the till. Grandma (Kirin Kiki) lives with the family making a total of five persons in one small living space.

Dad explains to Shota that he and his partner are bonded here (puts hand on heart) not here (puts hand on genitalia). Yet one afternoon when everyone else is out, she comes on strong and the two adults indulge in an afternoon of passion. Until the children come home unexpectedly.

As if all these familial relationships weren’t complicated enough, father and son spot a little girl (Miyu Sasaki) sitting on the street. She’s hungry, so they take her to their home and give her a meal. That turns into an overnight stay. They try and take her back to her own home, but it’s clear in the street outside from her parents’ clearly audible and highly vocal arguing that neither father nor mother wants the child currently nor ever did. So the family decides to take Yuri in as its newest member.

Shota takes Yuri on a shoplifting trip but it doesn’t go so well. She’s both naive and inexperienced. A shop assistant tells him to quit involving his sister in his shoplifting activities. Much later on, the boy takes the girl on another shoplifting spree which ends in him getting caught, the police questioning the entire family and unexpected revelations about the family itself.

Koreeda has ventured into this territory of the non-nuclear family before. Nobody Knows (2004) featured a group of children left to fend for themselves in an urban environment. Like Father, Like Son (2013) had each of two couples mistakenly bring up a boy as their own after two boys were switched at birth in the hospital. The Japanese director seems fascinated by family function and dysfunction. Why the family unit matters – and when it might be redundant.

All of which is constantly engaging and its assorted characters compelling. One is drawn to them and yet, at the same time, it’s not a family you’d want to be part of when its reality is eventually exposed. The film picked up the Palme d’Or in Cannes and numerous other awards elsewhere. Koreeda seems to be on a winning streak at the moment after The Third Murder (2017). For good measure, Shoplifters also boasts a terrific score by Haruomi Hosono, his first for Koreeda.

Shoplifters plays in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) on Sunday, November 4th . Buy tickets here. It’s out in cinemas Friday, November 23rd, and on VoD on Monday, March 25th (2019).

Foreboding (Yocho)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is not exactly a remake, not exactly a reboot, not exactly a sequel. Most definitely a companion piece, though, and arguably the more effective of the two movies. And apparently, an edit of the director’s five-part series for Japanese satellite station Wowow, although it feels like a (well over two hours long) standalone feature. Kiyoshi Kurosawa revisits Before We Vanish / Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha (2017) for another story about the aliens clad in human bodies who steal concepts from people’s minds by touching a finger to a forehead E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) style prior to a full scale invasion of Earth.

Where previously the director took the material and threw a cornucopia of different elements at it, this time round his efforts feel much more thought through and the resultant film far more consistent overall – a creepy and unsettling sci-fi paranoia thriller grounded in compelling, character-driven human drama.

Kurosawa builds his reinvented narrative round shop floor worker Etsuko (Kaho) whose friend Miyuki is going mad because of the strange presence in her home. Is it a ghost? No, it’s her father but she no longer has any concept of father. Or mother. Or brother and sister. Or family. An alien has removed this concept from her brain.

Her hospital employee husband Tatsuo (Shota Sometani) is behaving oddly too – experiencing pain in his wrist. He has been turned into a guide – a human who tells his alien controller from which humans to steal concepts. His controller is the newly arrived Dr. Matsuka (Masahiro Higashide) about whom Etsuko immediately senses something odd when she meets him.

Tatsuo’s wrist pain comes from the process of turning him into a guide which involved Matsuka’s grasping him by the wrist. The pair have been going around stealing concepts from people’s minds with Tatsuo suggesting the people (picking those he doesn’t particularly like) and Matsuka doing the stealing. As it turns out, they weren’t responsible for what happened to Miyuki. That was another alien and guide.

It further transpires that Etsuko is somehow resistant to the alien concept stealing process, which means the government wants to work with her. Kaho is terrific as the woman trying to hold on to a husband being driven off the rails through a mixture of forces both within and beyond his control, conjured by a suitably agonised performance from Sometani. Higashide gives off just the right degree of unsettling otherworldliness to make you believe he’s an alien walking around in a human body.

It’s not just the playing of the actors that makes this work, though. Kurosawa invests the whole thing with an incredible sense of dread – what if I round the next hospital corridor and that alien is waiting there for me? – and stretches the tension about as near to breaking point as you can imagine. A late scene in an expansive interior is basically a woman with a gun looking for an adversary who we know to be holding an axe in readiness for attack.

Such a scenario must have been executed in countless thrillers with varying degrees of suspense or lack of it. You don’t always know what you’re going to get with Kurosawa, but when he’s good he’s very good indeed – and this is edge of the seat stuff. Hard to believe that his other version of the same story is so average, unfocused and generally all over the place by comparison.

Yocho (Foreboding) plays in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer (Japanese, no subtitles) below:

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 Crimson Star (Makka Na Hoshi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Y[/dropcap[o (Miku Komatsu), 14, soon to leave hospital, tells Yayoi (Yuki Sakurai) that the latter is her favourite nurse. “Even though I made you cry when I stuck that needle in your foot?,” comes the questioning reply. When Yo checks out a day or so later, she learns that Yayoi is no longer working at the hospital.

Given to sneaking out via her bedroom window at any time of the day or night, some time later Yo is out walking at night when she sees two people having sex in a car. They get out. She’s sure she’s seen Yayoi and for confirmation takes Daisuke, a friend her own age, to see. Later, she leaves home and moves in with Yayoi. Who tries to put her off doing so.

In the course of working as a prostitute, Yayoi has struck up a relationship with a married man who loves taking her paragliding. But their spiritual connection seems at odds with their physical one. While Yayoi lets Yo stay with her out of a sense of protection, Yo is slowly developing a crush on Yayoi. There’s an idea about distance and attainability with Yo glimpsing a crimson paraglider unaware it might be Yayoi.

On her occasional return visits home, in and out through her bedroom window, Yo runs into trouble when she encounters her mother’s partner who is both violent towards and attempts to sexually abuse her.

Yayoi and subsequently Yo take refuge from their lives in a small observatory where they can open the telescope doors and gaze at the stars for long periods of time. It’s a place Yo and Daisuke have long admired but been unable to access.

If Yo and Yayoi are a sometime dysfunctional mother and daughter or occasional dysfunctional lovers – and Yo’s own family an example of an emotionally distant mother protecting a child-abusive partner – at least Daisuke’s family are offered as proof that some families provide a nurturing and caring environment. So much so, in fact, that when at one point his family takes her in it turns out a pleasant experience.

Female Japanese director Aya Igashi has an extraordinary way of expressing emotions and feelings on screen. She has also found some very effective ways of shooting sex scenes. For instance in silhouette, so even though you know (and hear) exactly what’s happening, you can see virtually nothing. A Crimson Star is neither exploitative nor titillating, yet it absolutely gets to the heart of the matter. The female gaze, perhaps?

This accomplished and highly original first feature is unlike any other movie this writer has ever seen. Hopefully, we’ve not heard the last of Aya Igashi who, at a mere 22 years old, is surely a talent to watch.

A Crimson Star plays in the Raindance Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Isle of Dogs

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

The worlds of Wes Anderson are heartfelt places that have their own delightful little charms. Steadily building these environments, alongside unique aesthetics, characters, mise-en-scene and poignant writing, an Anderson film is a vivid trip into colourful tweeds or vistas- whilst expressing genuine human emotion. Following in the animated footsteps of Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009), Isle of Dogs progresses his distinctive tone with further emotive filmmaking – a form only achievable by a select few creatives. Working in this mould, it cements the auteur’s capacity to speak to profound human truths through beautifully realised moods. This Eastern futuristic land yields tenderness that swiftly transcends the stationary nature of its canine characters.

Taking place 20 years into the future in the Japanese megacity of Megasaki City, all dogs have been banished from society by the executive decision of Major Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). Infecting their immune systems with flu to cause mass hysteria, it is a political move that symmetrically reflects Putin’s Russia. Predating the action with a quaint flashback to the centuries of fighting between the cat-loving Kobayashi family and free dog loving people of Japan, it is an approach that foregrounds the cyclical presence of fairy-tales in global storytelling. Executed with nuance, it’s an example of how to approach short retrospective narrative, recently evident in Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), though exempt from praise of a similar approach in Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow, 2017).

Part of an Alpha pack of dogs, Chief (Byran Cranston), Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Bill Murray), King (Bob Balaban) and Duke (Jeff Goldblum) are all stranded on Trash Island due to Major Kobayashi’s punishment. Living off scraps and fighting other packs to win the garbage, their domesticated lives are sorely missed. Unlike his fellow dogs, Chief is a stray who was raised in the streets, away from the luxuries of dog food and pedicures. Crashing on the island in the attempt to find his lost dog Spots (Liev Schreiber), Atari (Koyu Rankin) finds solace in the pack and their unanimous decision to help the 12-year-old boy. Journeying to the ends of Trash Island, the narrative maintains a classical edge.

Spawned by the power of the internet, the social media posts of ‘Accidentally Wes Anderson’ corroborate the captivating designs that the director and his creative team conjure. Created by Mackinnon and Saunders, a Manchester-based Puppeteer company, the dogs are bespoke intricate creations. Infused with fur that sways in the wind, accompanied by little ticks, the stop-motion moves as though it was digitalised, not handmade. This slight of hand leads to the creatures being anthropomorphic in movement and feeling. Fusing together with the talent of the voice cast, featuring the likes of Greta Gerwig’s Tracy Walker to Frances McDormand’s Interpreter Nelson, the ensemble cast intertwine with their puppets to an idiosyncratic affect.

Transitioning through the world with clean whips and pans, Tristan Oliver’s camera merges with the editing of trio Edward Bursch, Ralph Foster and Andrew Weisblum to extend the sharp script’s humorous and tender moments. Flowing, these two factors help the film’s visual language be a kaleidoscopic affair. Behind the images, the script of Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Nomura absorbs itself in an abundance of dog related puns. Blending the comedic with some tragic, the screenplay is finely poised being which leaves a glowing presence of elation.

In his recent review for the Los Angeles Times, the critic Justin Chang suggested that ‘Anderson, a stickler for verisimilitude even in the weirdest situations, has the human residents of Megasaki City speak their native Japanese, a choice that would seem respectful enough except for the conspicuous absence of English subtitles.’’ To this end, the critic constructs a point well worth noting. Still, one cannot outright claim this is total ‘cultural appropriate’ as all of the tones of the film come from a place of love, not ridicule. Anderson does allow his film to be entered into the age-old debate of appropriation vs appreciation, however. Flourished with odes to Japanese culture, specifically Seven Samurai’s (Akira Kurosawa, 1954) Fumio Hayasaka’s score, there is an omnipresent ubiquitous devotion towards Eastern culture. Heightened in a comical dog-related take on Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the appreciation outweighs the appropriation in my book. In his later work, Kurosawa explored the very nature of grand tales in Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985) and Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990), resonating to the core of Anderson’s newest feature.

Aside from any supposed acts of cultural misappropriation that Isle of Dogs may uncover, Anderson writes a love letter to man and his best friend that unexpectedly hits a deeply profound level. Enwrapped in the form of endearing puppeteer characters, one could be mistaken to think its sweet nature is only for aesthetic purposes. Great things truly do come in small boxes.

Isle of Dogs is out on Friday, 30th March. It’s available on VoD from Monday, August 6th.

Before We Vanish (Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This review is of a first viewing. It really doesn’t happen often, but I can imagine liking this more second time round. Before We Vanish is a very strange and unusual movie, from Japan.

Hands take a goldfish from a group in a white bathtub and transfer it into a metal pan. A sailor-suited schoolgirl carries the fish in a bag to another house. Inside the latter, on its floor, the fish struggles to breathe as it lies on the ground out of water. Spattered with blood, the girl (Yuri Tsunematsu) walks happily along the middle of a busy road. As she strolls without a care, a lorry swerving to avoid her crashes headlong into an oncoming car.

Elsewhere, something is wrong with Shinji Kase (Ryuhei Matsuda from The Raid 2, Gareth Evans, 2014). His behaviour alarms his wife Narumi (Masami Nagasawa from Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015, playing in LEAFF this Saturday 28/10). For instance, he suddenly vanishes from the house only to be found lying, quite happily, in the tall grass of a nearby field.

“No-one is saying anything,” says journalist Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa from Love And Peace, Sion Sono, 2015) who spends much of the time driving around in a van with a satellite dish on the roof. He’s convinced that a big story is about to break and intends to be the one doing it.

The girl hooks up with a boy (Mahiro Takasugi). Both are convinced they are aliens who have taken possession of human bodies. An invasion is coming and three of them have been sent ahead to lay the groundwork. Sakurai is definitely not an alien, but the other two let him tag along. The aliens are offering him an exclusive. Besides, in order to function they need a human to act as their ‘guide’.

Once resident within their human hosts, however, the aliens cannot comprehend many of the concepts that humans take for granted every day of their lives. Such as “individual”, “self”, “family” and “love”. But this issue is easily remedied. An alien finds a human with a clear idea of the concept of, say, “self”, touches them on the forehead with an extended finger (a bizarre nod to E.T., Steven Spielberg, 1982) and retrieves that concept from the victim’s head. The victim collapses immediately after the theft and is never quite the same again.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s meandering narrative mixes these conceits with more traditional sci-fi and action elements (but not that much of them, lest you might think of this as a generic SF picture – it is, but then again, it isn’t). There are battles with automatic weapons where the aliens get shot but hardly seem to notice. At least, until the resultant trauma proves too much for their host body.

One of the very first scenes has a woman pulled in through her own front door by an unseen adversary: towards the end, aircraft fly overhead delivering firebombs recalling similarly gratuitous flying aircraft at the close of the same director’s career-defining J-horror outing Pulse/Kairo (2001). Kurosawa tops this in Before We Vanish with a scene in which red lines drop from a cloud whirlpool above the sea then change course and fly towards the coast as burning fireballs.

The core of the piece is ultimately much less the plot, such as it is, than the characters: the aliens and their guides, the Kase family and the boy girl companions with the reporter tagging along. One minute it’s charming, the next it’s terrifying. One minute you’re watching a comedy, the next a moving romance and the next a sci-fi action movie. Which ought to render the whole thing an unwatchable disaster which can’t make up its mind as to what exactly it is. And yet somehow, in much the way that Pulse/Kairo threw every horror trope its director could envisage at the audience and yet produced something that cohered under a weird internal logic all of its own, the disparate elements of Before We Vanish hang together as a memorable whole. It’s both bonkers and beguiling in equal measure.

Before We Vanish plays in the London East Asia Film Festival. On Blu-ray and digital HD on Monday, February 11th.

ManHunt (Zhui bu)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The late Japanese actor Ken Takakura who died in 2014 appeared in more than 200 films and made his name playing ex-cons and gangsters for Toei studios between the mid-fifties and mid-seventies. He was a major inspiration for Hong Kong director John Woo who here remakes the 1976 Takakura vehicle Manhunt.

Du Qiu (Chinese actor Zhang Hanyu) finds himself in a Japanese bar swapping notes on movies with the mama-san Rain (Korea’s Ha Ji-won). Almost immediately, a loutish group of men in suits storm into the same bar to demand he leaves so she can give them her full attention. Once he’s gone, Rain and her partner Dawn (the director’s daughter Angeles Woo) proceed to gun down the suits, the camera whirling around them as Woo choreographs the mayhem.

Du is a lawyer working for a pharma company. The morning after a huge corporate event he wakes up to find a dead woman (Tao Okamoto) lying next to him in his bed. Implicated in her murder, he goes on the run. A cop Yamura (Fukuyama Masaharu from Like Father, Like Son, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2013) is assigned to catch him. Eventually after a series of pursuits and confrontations, the fugitive convinces the cop of his innocence and the two men join forces to clear Du’s name. As well as the two female assassins, they must contend with the villainous corporate head Sakai Yoshihiro (Kunimura Jun) and his insecure son Sakai Hiroshi (Ikeuchi Hiroyuki) plus the vengeful widow (Qi Wei) of a deceased research scientist.

Woo builds one incredible action set piece upon another which he perfectly integrates into his visual storytelling and bravura cinematic style. Numerous eye-popping fights, car chases and shoot outs pepper the thrilling proceedings while a sniper sequence and speedboat chase recall similar scenes from his masterpiece The Killer (1989). The contemporary Japanese backdrop, players and crew give the whole thing a clean, high tech feel and it’s refreshing to see female as well as male characters participate equally in the action: a shift in mores since the more male-oriented days of A Better Tomorrow (1986) or Hard Boiled (1992) twenty-five years ago.

In the end though, action and character are the thing. Holding to the maxim that action is character, Woo defines his protagonists by the way they look at each other, handle a gun or leap through the air, refining his directorial delivery via every tool at his disposal in his cinematic arsenal. The acting required on a John Woo production might be a lot more full on and physical than that demanded by most other directors, but the cast here rise to the considerable challenge thrown at them and acquit themselves well. It’s been a long time since John Woo has made anything like this: the result is a most welcome return to form.

ManHunt was a late addition to the BFI London Film Festival. Hopefully some enterprising UK distributor will snap it up and get it out there on screens before long. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook, and we’ll keep you posted!