Tag: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Wife of a Spy (Supai No Tsuma)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM VENICE

The 65-year-old Japanese filmmaker and screenwriter Kiyoshi Kurosawa has flirted with pretty much every conceivable genre, from romance and thriller to science fiction and horror. His latest movie is a historical drama based about two Japanese defectors during WW2. It was originally made for Japanese television, with a different aspect ratio and colour tone. And this is where it should have stayed.

Just as WW2 breaks out, local merchant Yusaku Fukuhara (Issey Takahashi) travels to Manchuria (a historical region in Northeastern China) with his nephew Fumio Takeshita (Ryôta Bandô). This is where they witness Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation. Yasaku collects evidence of the barbaric events, hellbent on exposing the horrors to the world. He does not see himself as a spy because he’s not working for anyone. He’s just committed to international fairness and transparency. At first, his wife Satoko (Yû Aoi) misinterprets his intentions and stands on his way. Eventually, she uncovers the truth and unequivocally sides with her spouse. Despite her initial hesitation, she will now do anything in order to make him happy.

This is not the portrayal of an empowered female, which would be a refreshing change in a society as sexist as Japan. Instead Satoko is submissive, borderline sycophantic. After all, she’s just the wife of a spy (what an awful film title). Ultimately, it’s her unflinching devotion to her husband – and not the desire for justice – that drives her forward. She comes across as frail and vulnerable, allowing her husband to make the decisions and come up with the defection plan.

The screenplay of Wife of a Spy – which was penned by Kurosawa alongside Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Tadashi Nohara – is both protracted and confusing. It took me a while to work out why the Satoko changed her mind about her husband, and where the allegiance of some of the people around Yusaku lay. Perhaps such ambiguity is intentional, I’m not sure. One way or another, it can alienate viewers. Plus the narrative lacks vigour, focusing mostly on banal dialogue. I felt mostly bored throughout the movie.

The horrific details of the Unit 731 experiments are almost entirely left out. This is a missed opportunity to portray the real-life atrocities and war crimes carried out by Imperial Japan. The remarkable fact that victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the West as communist propaganda is completely absent from the film. Instead of a creating powerful historical drama, Kurosawa opted for a half-based war thriller. The ending is particularly preposterous, with an awkwardly poetic image of a bombed town and the beach. The closing titles reveal the fate of the two characters after the War. I found this very confusing because – as far as I’m concerned and my research has revealed – Yusaku and Satoko are purely fictional characters.

Wife of a Spy is showing in Competition at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, which is taking place right now. The film the opening film at the San Sebastian Film Festival, taking place between September 18th and 26th. The film is vying for the the main prize at both events. It’s very unusual for two prestigious film festivals on the same continent to share their Competition entries.

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:

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:

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

Daguerrotype (Le Secret de la Chambre Noire)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In a large house in a rural French town, contemporary photographer Stéphane (Olivier Gourmet) employs 19th century daguerreotype photographic plate techniques involving lengthy exposures. (The “chambre noire” of the title is the French term for both “darkroom” and “camera obscura”.) Subjects must remain utterly motionless for 20 minutes at a time in order for their image to be captured without becoming blurred. Stéphane attaches his models to metal rigs designed to hold them in place for the duration, an experience both uncomfortable and sometimes painful for them. He makes a living from fashion shoots set up by his colleague Vincent (Mathieu Amalric).

In between paid gigs, Stéphane obsessively photographs on a larger plate camera life-sized images of his 22-year-old daughter Marie (Constance Rousseau) just as while she was still alive he previously lensed his late wife Denise (Valérie Sibilia). Exposing his daughter for longer and longer periods of time of around 60 minutes, he sometimes has her drink liquid compounds to help her keep still.

Marie is concerned that the mercury-laden chemicals required for her father’s work, spillages and seepages of which can kill vegetation, are stored near the greenhouse in which she’s grown rare plants since she was a child. She wants to study botany and gets accepted on a course in Toulouse. This would mean moving away from home. She’s deeply unhappy about the father-daughter relationship and her father’s new assistant Jean (Tahar Rahim), talking to estate agent Thomas (Malik Zidi), hatches a plan to convince Stéphane of Marie’s death so that he will sell the house at a low price enabling Jean and Marie to make a fast buck by reselling at market value. It’s the sort of plot from which Hitchcock or Chabrol might have made a terrific suspense thriller.

“He’s confused photography and reality for so long he can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead”, Marie confides to Jean. A few minutes in, when neither Jean nor the audience have been introduced to Marie, he spots her as a silent apparition in a blue, nineteenth century dress moving slowly up a staircase to be briefly framed like a pictorial subject in the circular landing above. Have we just seen a ghost?

Occasional creaks, blackouts and apparitions recall classic ghost stories like The Innocents (Jack Clayton, 1961) or The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963). There’s a scene when Marie emerges from a bedroom that recalls the a similar scene in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and there are echoes in the father’s moulding his daughter into her departed mother which recall Obsession (Brian DePalma. 1976), itself a reworking of Vertigo. The heavily melancholic/ romantic score by Grégoire Hetzel, while light years away from Bernard Herrmann’s work for Vertigo and Obsession, has a similar effect.

However, those expecting a shocker like Kurosawa’s own Pulse/Kairo (2001) or Creepy (2016) are likely to be disappointed. Admittedly, an unexpected fall down some stairs proves as unnerving as anything in Pulse/Kairo and unsettling corridor lighting cues recall rival J-horror ghost outing Dark Water (Hideo Nakata, 2002). Yet the film largely eschews J-horror shock tactics to deliver a far more meditative, languorous and fluid experience to dreamlike, ethereal effect – as you might expect from a film based around the slow processes of nineteenth century photography.

Despite the French cast, crew, locations and architecture, this feels every inch a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film with numerous echoes of his other, Japanese-shot work. Opening exteriors recall the house that opens Before We Vanish (2017) and in almost every scene, there’s a clean feel to the composition familiar from those other films. Away from his native Japan, Kurosawa has imposed his own unique visual sensibilities on French culture and come up with something at once recognisably French and at the same time strangely alien to that culture.

(A note on spelling: the photographic plate is referred to as a ‘Daguerreotype’ after its inventor Louis Daguerre, while the film’s title drops the second ‘e’, presumably to make the English title’s pronunciation easier for a popular audience.)

Daguerrotype is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection. And don’t forget to check our interview with Kurosawa!

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.