Tag: Japanese

Our dirty questions to Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Posted on by victorfraga

With a career spanning nearly four decades, the 62-year-old Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has directed more than 40 films, and he has navigated a wide variety of genres, ranging from horror and suspense to romance and family drama. He directed four films in the past two years alone. The filmmaker, who is not related in any way to Akira Kurosawa, is also a film writer, critic and professor.

Kurosawa has recently stepped on European cinema soil where he directed the French ghost story Daguerrotype. This classy art house feature tells the story of a contemporary photographer who employs 19th century daguerreotype plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. And that might give uninvited entities the opportunity to manifest themselves! Daguerrotype is part of the Walk This Way Collection, which DMovies is promoting in a partnership with The Film Agency and Under The Milky Way. You can watch it at home right now on all major VoD platforms!

In our short existence of less than two years (we celebrate our second birthday in a few weeks, on February 6th), Kurosawa has flown under our radar three times, firstly with Creepy, in 2016, and twice last year, with Daguerrotype and Before We Vanish. So we decided to ask him a few questions about his experience in Europe, his connection if any to Western filmmakers such as Spielberg and Hitchcock, what genres he wants to work on next and whether he can predict the future!

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Jeremy Clarke – How would you describe your experience working with a French cast and crew in Daguerrotype (2017; pictured above)? Was it a good experience? Would you like to work with foreign casts and crews again in the future?

Kiyoshi Kurosawa – It was an amazing experience. Against my perceptions the attitudes of the French cast and crew were very similar to those in Japan. All of them understood their job was “to realise the director’s vision with all their abilities and efforts”. I really appreciated it.

JC – Could you please explain the writing process of Daguerrotype? I see two other names besides you in the screenwriter credit.

KK – Based on an idea of a story which I had been working on over 10 years, I wrote a script set in modern France. The script was translated into French, and then the brilliant French screenwriters rewrote it, so that the script would fit well into the situation in today’s France. So it was a complicated process.

JC – You seem to be a director who enjoys working on a vague idea or theme, and then shapes the movie during the production process bringing in various images, effects, scenes and sequences. Pulse (2001) or Before We Vanish (2017, pictured below) would be examples for this. In which way does this approach specifically appeal to you?

KK – The very base of cinematic expression is to film the reality in front of you using cameras. So, the similarity with the reality would be the feature of a movie. This could be also its limitation, but anyway, I am particularly interested in the fact that a movie is almost the same as reality, but at the same time is slightly different than reality. This difference or unreality is always my starting point when I create my work.

JC – Could you please explain the reason why a low altitude plane comes often at a climax of your works, such as in Pulse or Before We Vanish?

KK – That’s an interesting observation. I never realised it myself! It might be because a movement of a protagonist looking at the sky seems to me very cinematic somehow. However, I can’t explain it that well.

JC – In Before We Vanish, I see influences of Spielberg’s E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). Do you appreciate the movie?

KK – Spielberg is one of my favorite filmmakers and I also appreciate E.T.. However, I don’t necessarily consider it as the best work in his filmography. There’s no particular borrowed motif in Before we Vanish. However he has created many human-alien encounter SF movies and my favorites would be Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and War of the Worlds (2005). So it’s possible that there are Spielberg influences at some unconscious level.

JC – Creepy (2016, pictured below) recalls works by Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho; 1958 and 1960 respectively) as well as Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999). To what degree were you aware of these films when you filmed Creepy?

KK – Sorry, but I was aware of neither Hitchcock nor Miike.

JC – You have been working in various genres. For crime, Creepy and Cure (1997). For drama, Tokyo Sonata (2008) and Before We Vanish. For romance, Tokyo Sonata, Journey to the Shore (2015) and Before We Vanish. What genre or genres would you like to revisit on future movie projects?

KK – In the future I want to work on genres I haven’t worked on yet. I haven’t worked on genres such as musical, historical and comedy movies.

JC – When you join a project (as a screenwriter or director), what makes you do so? How do you know if a story makes you want to tell it?

KK – That’s a difficult question. I cannot name a core element which makes a movie. It also means that there are too many factors. One thing I can say would be meeting people. It might be a producer, an actor or an original writer. Meeting someone, in the end, boosts the production of a movie, I guess.

JC – Looking back at Pulse, that movie catches the historical moment in which people used dial-up internet connections and the internet itself was still new for most of us. In today’s cultural development phase is there anything particular which inspires you?

KK – This question is also hard to answer. When I’m told that Pulse predicted the future, I have to say that was not my original intention at all. How a movie is interpreted by society after its birth is purely accidental.

JC – When you write a screenplay, what is your typical writing process?

KK – When it comes to screenplays, I read the original book or/and hear the ideas of others at first, then play with them a while, and, eventually, write it by myself without asking anyone else’s opinion.

JC – Which qualities do you look for in actors in order to cast roles? When and how often do you refilm?

KK – I don’t refilm. Even if I wanted to, there is no capacity for time and budget in Japanese commercial movies. As for casting, I consider it some sort of destiny. We think somebody is good for a role, she/he also likes the script and the role. And it has to go well with the schedule and guaranteed fee. When everything works well, it becomes automatically the best casting.

JC – In Japanese movie culture, in what kind of position are you or your works placed? And how about in the global movie culture?

KK – I myself cannot say objectively where I would be positioned in Japanese movie culture. However, I feel that I’m at the middle. Not at the top, not at the bottom. This doesn’t mean that I’m in the centre of the culture, of course. I understand myself as being at a small corner of the culture. And in the wider, international world? Many Japanese movies are introduced abroad – and my works would probably be positioned also at the middle of the edge of them.

Image at the top by Bittermelon

MFKZ (international title: Mutafukaz)

Posted on by mjbstaging

Firstly, Mutafukaz (as MFKZ was originally named) is a Japanese animated feature made by the French for the French market utilising Japanese animation expertise (the version playing at the London Film Festival is French with subtitles, though the end credits suggest there might also be an English language version), secondly a very French, lowlife, dystopian action movie to rank alongside the live action likes of Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990) and, particularly, District 13 (Pierre Morel, 2004) and thirdly an adaptation of a French bande dessinée, the director Guillaume Renard having penned the original in comic book form under the name Run.

The animation medium allows the piece to completely design its images and environment from, as it were, the blank page/empty screen upwards and the results are fabulous. Japanimation company Studio 4°C previously worked on such high profile anime productions as SF portmanteau Memories (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1995), avant garde pop video Noiseman Sound Insect (Koji Morimoto, 1997) and fan favourite Spriggan (Hirotsugu Kawasaki, 1998) to name but three (others are name dropped in the trailer) and pull out all the stops here.

(Ange)lino is a small, young, black guy vaguely resembling Marvin Martian without the helmet and struggling to survive the mean streets of Dark Meat City (“DMC, as in Desperate, Miserable, Crap”) where he rents a roach-infested apartment with his mate Vinz whose head resembles a human skull, bare bone, no flesh, column of fire permanently burning on top. Lino can barely hold down a job for more than a few days.

We first meet Lino on a pizza delivery boy gig which falls apart when the sight of a pretty girl causes him to have a bike accident. Unemployed, Lino and Vinz are visited by their nervous liability of a friend Willy. As the three cruise around in a car, Lino notices a strange phenomenon inspired by They Live (John Carpenter, 1988): people who cast shadows belonging to creatures not of this Earth. Meanwhile, a mother with her baby in her arms is being hunted by mysterious, gun-toting men in black suits led by one wearing a white suit. Before long, they’ll be after Lino and Vinz too.

The film rattles along at a rapid pace through urban malaise, gangland shoot-outs and conspiracy theories, in passing presenting a squalid environment that could stand in for the seamier side of any number of real life cities. Designed in glorious, eye-popping colour and with a hip hop sensibility referencing Grand Theft Auto and more, it never lets up for a moment.

Although the production values have anime written all over them, with key fight scenes shots sporting familiar tropes of that medium, Renard’s Francophile sensibilities inject a whole other aesthetic and indeed feel to the proceedings. It’ll no doubt be huge in France, but it’s an impressive work which transcends its national culture and deserves to see a UK distributor taking a chance and giving it a proper release here too. I could never imagine London Transport accepting posters bearing the film’s international title, though. Which is why the new English language title MFKZ makes a lot of sense.

MFKZ played at BFI London Film Festival 2017 as Mutafukaz. It’s released in the UK on October 11th. Watch the 2017 international film trailer and the new 2018 English language film trailer below:

Genocidal Organ (Gyakusatsu Kikan)

Posted on by victorfraga

This is sci-fi of the ‘soldiers in a combat zone’ variety (think: Aliens, James Cameron, 1986) and as such comes with all the trappings of fetishised hardware – cybernetic internet point-of-view readouts and high-tech military machinery – along with the standard ‘horror of war’ scenarios seen in, for example, that other animated war movie Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) – and desensitised, shoot ‘em up scenarios in which the protagonist guns down 30 or so child/teen warriors and a girl in underwear (the latter the sexual plaything of a middle-aged man).

Genocidal Organ starts off with the levelling of Sarajevo in a nuclear blast wherein victims include the wife and child of a man named John Paul who is having sex with Czech language teacher Lucie Skroupova in a Prague hotel room when the blast hits. Although when you first see these images, you don’t know exactly what’s going on – it only makes sense later.

It also echoes Missing (Costa-Gavras, 1982) in which a US citizen’s search to find his missing daughter in Chile following the 1973 coup eventually comes up against the US authorities “protecting a way of life”. For the US to flourish, other countries have to suffer. Something similar happens in Genocidal Organ when the two off-duty soldiers relax to American football games on widescreen television with home delivery pizza. In order to protect that world of casual consumer satisfaction, they operate in a very different world of Eastern European states collapsing into war zones. The two worlds co-exist, the collapsing states ensuring the survival of the way of life in the non-collapsing ones.

Captain Clavis Shepherd must pursue John Paul, a language expert whose travels have left in their wake a trail of nations overthrown by genocide. His research has unearthed ways of speaking and associated speech patterns which can cause populations to lapse into social breakdown. Shepherd’s big lead is Lucie Skroupova, the woman with whom John Paul had an affair.

En route, the plot takes us through a Czech nightclub where the digital currency and identity trackers in use elsewhere have been abandoned to give customers genuine anonymity. Fetishised hardware geeks in particular will enjoy the terrific sequence in which soldiers in pods are dropped into battle zones, their pods firing at/shooting down the enemy as the soldiers descend from the skies.

Finally, the ending satisfyingly closes off the narrative with a hint that it may presage an unexpected twist in the tale.

Given this is about American troops in Bosnia, the Czech Republic and East Africa (near Lake Victoria), the English subtitled version proves initially confusing in that the protagonists are not Japanese but rather US and European nationals. The Japanese language presentation would no doubt work well for the domestic Japanese audience – and, for that matter, the Western purist who wants to watch their anime subbed regardless – however, in this instance, the US-centric subject matter might have benefited from dubbing into US American English and other relevant languages (with subtitles where necessary). As it stands, this subtitled Genocidal Organ proves confusing in places for an English-speaking audience. Yet it still packs a hefty punch.

Genocidal Organ is out in the UK on Wednesday, July 12th.

In this Corner of the World

Posted on by victorfraga

This tale of life on the Japanese home front during WW2 is set in the major shipbuilding port of Kure in the Hiroshima Prefecture. The nearest city to Kure is Hiroshima: once you know that, you know the story isn’t going to end well. Welcome to In this Corner of the World.

Heroine Suzu Urano must leave the small fishing village where she grew up and move to Kure to marry a low level naval clerk. Living with his family brings its own challenges, such as getting on with her new husband’s sharp-tongued sister. These characters accept that not only does their government know best but also the War is an historical inevitability that must be endured for the greater good. Yet although there are sacrifices to be made, the War itself mostly seems an abstract, distant event which for most of its five years doesn’t really intrude that much upon everyday life.

Suzu loves to paint and draw and often has her sketchbook with her. Occasionally she finds herself in trouble when officials catch her sketching things they don’t want anyone depicting in wartime. But mostly, she delights in nature and the world around her. Director Katabuchi similarly delights in the medium of hand drawn animation.

Fumiyo Kouno’s manga, originally serialised in Manga Action magazine between 2007 and 2009, went through a lot of trouble to research the long vanished environments of Hiroshima and Kure and in the film Katabuchi expends similar effort. The result is that the drama plays out in convincing settings which go some way to draw the viewer in. Alas, much of the meandering domestic narrative counteracts the undeniably impressive visuals.

The final reel is another story, however. As American bombing raids reach Kure, the frightening realities of international warfare finally impose themselves on the civilian population. In something of a visual and emotional tour de force, Suzu and her small niece Harumi are caught in a blast in which Suzu suffers the loss of a limb. Suddenly it feels like we’re in a different movie, yet afterwards Suzu struggles resolutely to carry on and help others.

Worse is to come, though, in the form of a flash as the atomic bomb is dropped on the neighbouring city of Hiroshima. Initially no-one quite knows what has happened, although the full horror of the situation becomes clear to Suzu when she visits the area. Finding a small child wandering alone in the ruins, she and her husband adopt the girl who can be seen growing up in their post-war home as the credits roll. If the film ends on this optimistic note, its briefly seen, latter images of ordinary people affected by the harsh realities of conventional and nuclear warfare overshadow everything else.

In This Corner Of The World is out in the UK on Wednesday, June 28th.

After the Storm

Posted on by victorfraga

No family drama is too simple. There is a sense of tragedy in every fall out, and yet there is hope in every small gesture. Your good fortune lies in the trivial actions, the banal discussions, the petty events and the unexpected minor twists. After the Storm investigates the professional collapse of Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), and the consequences for his immediate family, as well as his attempts to make up for his shortcomings. The Japanese director Koreeda is best-known for the films Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008).

Ryota used to be a prize-winning author, but his success has now faded away, and he now makes money as a second-class detective blackmailing some of his victims (such as unfaithful wives), and he also has to placate a gambling addiction. He can hardly pay for child support for his son Shingo. He often visits his avuncular, aging and still very active mother Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki) following his father’s death, and he suspects that his sister is trying to sponge her off. He is sheltered in his old lady’s house with his ex-wife Kyoko (Yoko Maki) and their son as a typhoon hits town, and he takes the opportunity to try to make amends with them.

The movie is populated with glib yet strangely amusing pearls of popular wisdom, particularly coming from Yoshiko. She explains that “the longer the man sits, the more the flavours set in”, in an indirect reference to the fact her son is also growing old. She also notes that more friends at her age just means “more funerals”. Such comments combined with simple yet very intense dialogues render the film very universal and relatable. There’s beauty in the technical frugality, realistic precision and urgent simplicity of narrative.

Another one of the film highlights is an extremely unusual and visceral link between mother and son kept inside a box.

It’s not coincidence that the most important events in the movie take place during a typhoon. The violent natural phenomenon is a wake-up call, and it forces Ryota inside the safest of all places: his tiny mother’s flat, the equivalent to the maternal womb. In fact her dwelling is so small you have to move away from the table in order to open the fridge and the bathtub (pictured at the top) is about the size of a sink (in fact it’s a Japanese ofuro).

The attempt to reconnect with a different generation plus the location of the film in Tokyo will inevitably generate comparisons to Ozu’s 1953 classic Tokyo Story, possibly the most successful Japanese film ever made. The difference is that here it’s the son, not the parents, who is trying to rekindle the relationship, and the the elderly lady here seems very content in her predicament. It’s worth mentioning that After the Storm is a very personal film, written by Koreeda and filmed at the block where he grew up with his mother (not too different from what Tarkovsky did in Mirror in 1975).

In a way, the mundaneness of the movie is also an ironic commentary on the challenges that a former successfully writer such a Ryota has to face. His son grimaces at the definition of literary talent, thereby highlighting a challenge that any writer – including filmmakers – have to face: how do you constantly find freshness and originality in the trivial and banal? And this also one of the problems with After the Storm: it takes a long time before it enraptures you – with me it happened towards the last third of the 119-minute saga.

After the Storm was out in cinemas across the UK in June, when this piece was originally written. It was made available on BFI Player in the first week of October.

Harmonium

Posted on by victorfraga

Hotaru (Momone Shinokawa) is a young girl learning to play the harmonium (aka a pump organ) for an upcoming concert. Her dad Toshio (Fukada regular Kanji Furutachi) runs a small engineering supplies business out of his garage workshop. Her mum Akie (Mariko Tsutsui) encourages Hotaru’s learning of the instrument and helps with her husband’s business accounts. Into this seemingly harmonious and ordinary family setup steps Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano), an old friend of Toshio’s recently released from prison. Yasaka seeks work and Toshio takes him on as an assistant. As the latter tells his wife, it’s a win-win situation as he currently has a high volume of work.

However there is more to both men than meets the eye – there are many secrets which relate to their shared past and which will be revealed one at a time at various points in the narrative. As can be seen from the UK trailer (at the bottom of this review) with Toshio demanding of Yasaka,”what did you do?”, a devastating event occurs towards the halfway point of the piece which changes everything (although we aren’t going to spoil the film for you and give it away). The film splits roughly into two parts, with the second part taking place some eight years after the first and involving another assistant employee the youthful Takashi (Taiga) with a different actress (Kana Mahiro) playing the adult Hotaru.

Despite the commensalism, Harmonium isn’t a straight forward family drama.

As the narrative progresses, Yasaka interferes with the female family members. First he inveigles his way into becoming Hotaru’s harmonium teacher, then having secured Akie’s trust and friendship, he begins making sexual advances towards Akie. The situation worsens all the time and you know it isn’t going to end well.

Opening with the merciless tick of a metronome, Harmonium is a relentless journey at a constant and unstoppable if slow pace. When you think it’s gone about as far as it can, it stops, jumps forward some eight years in time then goes even further in its second half. It’s a difficult film to categorise – it takes the form of a Japanese family drama, but if that sounds clean and rose-tinted don’t be fooled: it’s much darker and bleaker. While a few scenes play (effectively enough) like small screen fare the remainder carry an enormous latent power helped in no small part by a clutch of terrific performances. An unassuming little film on the surface which turns out as you watch to be a monumentally devastating one. Don’t miss.

Harmonium is out in the UK on Friday, May 5th. Full list of cinemas (which will regularly be updated) screening Harmonium may be found by clicking right here. Watch the clever, spoiler-free film trailer below:

Click here for our review of Destruction Babies (Tetsuya Mariko, 2016), another very recent highlight from Japanese cinema.

A Silent Voice (Eiga Koe no katachi)

Posted on by victorfraga

Superficially, this is a very clean looking film. It’s anime, it’s a high school drama; school children are drawn with clean lines and bright colours in bright settings with mostly clear blue skies. Beneath that clean veneer, though, lurks dirt. Psychological dirt. Bullying. Its effect on the self-worth of the victimised and the perpetrator. Self-loathing. Suicide.

Shoya Ishida (voice: Miyu Irino) has marked the days up to the 15th on his calendar and torn off the numbers after. He does his last day at work, sells his possessions, leaves the money with his mum to pay off an outstanding debt and goes out to jump off the local river bridge. Flashback: in elementary school he is a troublemaker who picks on the new girl in class Shoko Nishimiya (Saori Hayami), who happens to be deaf. Nishimiya tries hard to be nice to her classmates asking them to communicate with her via the notebook and pencil she carries around. Perhaps she tries a little bit too hard and apologises once too often. In the playground, Ishida throws little stones at her and when she tries to be friendly, he literally lobs dirt on her face. Naoka Ueno (Yuki Kaneko) encourages his actions. Eventually he’s hauled up by the principal for repeatedly plucking Nishimiya’s hearing aid off (to the tune of some eight sets).

Shunned by others for his bullying, Ishida stops interacting with them and withdraws. This is represented onscreen by the extraordinary graphic device of an ‘X’ over the faces of his fellow schoolmates whenever they appear. It’s a very powerful way of expressing his isolation. Five years on, wrecked with guilt about his treatment of Nishimiya, he learns sign language and decides to befriend her and to make amends…

His fellow elementary classmates too are struggling to come to terms with their varying degrees of complicity in aiding or condoning his bullying. They may be children and this may be animation, but these are complex characters, deeply scarred, and yet still trying to find ways to move forward and live.

asilentvoice2
Diversity isn’t always embraced in the school playground

This film may well broaden your idea of what animation is capable. It’s nothing like Disney and equally it’s light years from Japanese SF action fest Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988) although it likewise started life as a manga and concerns teenagers. These teens, however, are not rebels against the system but simply very ordinary, screwed up kids. If this were British we’d probably have made it as a live action drama, possibly for television. It feels long at 129 minutes, but that running length allows for complexities of character and plot that a shorter running length would have sacrificed.

In the end, you get to feel how a disabled person struggles to fit in as much as you do a bully’s remorse for what he’s done against an ongoing background of other interconnected minor characters. It’s a very dirty movie, but it’s the internal dirt of the mind that’s under observation here. A challenging and demanding work, it’s also an extraordinary and groundbreaking piece of animation unlike anything else you’re likely to see on the screen this year.

Beyond that, it’s innovative on another level: it will play some UK cinema screenings with hard of hearing subtitles to allow hard of hearing audience members to experience the full film, including sound effects and music. Which seems highly appropriate given its subject matter.

A Silent Voice is out in the UK on Friday, March 17th, with exclusive screenings nationwide on March 15th.