Tag: Japanese society

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.

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!