Night & Fog in Japan

An unsteady zoom shot finds us at the centre of a wedding reception. The opening scene, and the focal point of the action throughout the film, is a peculiarly joyless union of two former student activists, Nozawa and Reiko. Instead of being a celebratory occasion, it turns into a moral inquisition as various wedding guests and associates come forward to tell their story. In so doing, they gradually poison the atmosphere with accusations of political and personal infidelity.

Oshima's contempt for the ineffectiveness, as well as the hypocritical, bourgeois tendencies of the leftist Zengakuren movement is plain to see. As the history of Nozawa's faction unfolds, revealed through a series of flashbacks, their collective will is shown to be fatally undermined by internal power struggles. The demonstration against the US-Japan AMPO Treaty, a key battleground in the Zengakuren struggle, is lost. Characters like Nakayama, the group's vainglorious and didactic leader, are more interested in feathering their own nests than putting into practice the Marxist ideology they espouse.

In some ways, this austere, serious film about the generation gap (symbolized by Reiko, Nozawa and their professor at the bridal table) and the failure of matrimony and fraternity to bridge that gap, could be viewed as a triumph for Oshima; it was daring for its time, not just politically but also in a filmic sense - the expressionistic use of shots and overt theatricality are bold choices. But they are also bad choices, to my mind. The unrelenting dryness of the subject matter, the dark lighting, spatial constraints and humourlessness of everyone involved induces a grim ennui (it took me 4 separate attempts to get through it!). Likewise, the staginess of the production doesn't lend itself naturally to film. The AMPO demonstration, for instance, is given a symbolic treatment - pitching the set into darkness and spotlighting key protagonists in static postures of insurrection, like paintings of war in a dark, silent gallery. Your imagination is supposed to fill in the blanks. It's the kind of thing that works well on stage, but transplanted to the screen, just seems lifeless and self-consciously stylized.

In truth, this is a film that has become stratified in time. Taken out of the context of its very specific historical locus, stripped of its political relevance, it serves only to document a darkly remembered undercurrent of Japanese post-war history. On a narrative and dramatic level, it simply fails to engage.

日本の夜と霧
Dir. Nagisha Oshima, 1960

Black Rose Mansion

Out of the blue, mysterious chanteuse Ryuko starts frequenting Kyohei's private club, Black Rose Mansion, serenading its members (mostly middle-aged men) with romantic ballads. The whys are wherefores are never made clear but quickly she takes on an almost mythical aspect in the club, captivating everyone who lays eyes on her - not least of all Kyohei himself. In a grand romantic gesture, Kyohei renovates the mansion for Ryuko to live in in a bid to ensnare her affections. His plans are laid to waste though by the return of his prodigal son Wataru who, predictably, also falls in love with Ryuko. She duly betrays Kyohei for his son and ultimately Wataru is forced to choose between her and his father. Throughout the film, Ryuko carries a black rose, which she says will turn red when she finds her true love. As Kyohei predicts, it finally turns red through Wataru's spilt blood.

As I'm finding to be the case quite consistently with Fukasaku, the plot is essentially hokum and the narrative chock full of clunky devices - most obviously the eponymous black rose in this case - but all is not lost. Whilst still infused with the same 60s psychedelia, it doesn't feel as painfully modish as Blackmail Is My Life. It basically boils down a rather old-fashioned cautionary tale about the dangers of acceding to impetuosity; of confusing lust with love. And at its heart is the classic femme fatale in the shape of Ryuko. Except that she's not exactly a classic: in fact, a big dollop of suspended desbelief is required to buy into the idea that she is some kind of irresistable temptress. Her looks are unconventional to say the least, and her singing voice is deeper than an Arctic borehole. So it wasn't a complete shock to learn that she was played by famous female impersonator of the day, Akihiro Miwa. A strange casting choice, but in a way it just adds to the film's already unreal air - a curious melange of Buñuel, The Mod Squad and Hammer Horror, at its hammiest.

There's some ropey dialogue to be sure, and the visual effects leave a bit to be desired - the red poster paint makes another appearance, along with a proliferation of rather heavy-handed flashbacks, shot through a lurid scarlet filter - but I can't say I had a bad old time.

黒薔薇の館
Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1969

Blackmail Is My Life

Hokey 60s crime drama which sees a proto-Hustle team extort and blackmail their way through a series of a small jobs before landing the big one - and getting in over their heads; caught in the crossfire between a corrupt politician and a powerful loan shark.

Not much to recommend this really; the story is risible, the acting ligneous, and it's dated horribly - from the grating, jangly soundtrack to the painfully stylized camera work. Fukasaku doesn't deploy the freeze frame technique once or twice, he uses it throughout the entire movie as short-hand for flashbacks, or sometimes, just for the sheer hell of it. Coupled with wobbly pull back shots and randomly interspersed black and white segments, it's enough to make the viewer feel ill.

It also has some of the most laughable death sequences I've seen. Zero summons up the strength to throw three punches at thin air before collapsing theatrically, then, in the film's final sequence, Shun spills several buckets of red paint over a zebra crossing before uttering the priceless closing line; "what a stupid way to go". I couldn't agree more.

恐喝こそわが人生
Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1968

Tokyo Decadence

After my previous foray into pink cinema turned out to be more rewarding than expected, I thought I'd give this one a spin, especially since Ryu Murakami wrote the novel on which Miike's Audition was based.

Now, Rotten Tomatoes, among others, would have you believe that this is a savage indictment on Japan's sex industry and the hypocrisy of society at large. I can believe that may have been Murakami's intention, but the end result is a bit of a mess. At a couple of points it threatens to take an interesting turn; the claustrophobia of low-lit hotel rooms and shadowy, sadistic salarymen inviting seedy revelation, but proceeds instead to stumble through a series of rather tame, and deeply unerotic S&M scenes. The closest we get to a coherent, if less than subtle, social agenda is in the scene at the dominatrix's apartment, where she says something like "Japan is a wealthy country, ill at ease with its wealth; this breeds anxiety and masochistic tendencies, which I exploit for money". But ironically, she herself is dominated by a crack addiction. See the bigger picture? Nudge, nudge.

Our heroine, in a constant state of trepidation and desperately in need of a personality transplant, is Ai (Japanese for 'love'), played by Miho Nikaido. Ai is very much the submissive type, and I think we're supposed to feel for her and the debasement she is forced to endure. The trouble is I don't - I just find myself thinking, you've chosen to work for this agency, you keep going to the jobs... the only one that proves too much for her is being asked to recreate the murder and rape of a woman at the foot of Mount Fuji by a necrophiliac screening an image of said mountain onto the wall of his hotel room. The movie basically implodes in the final act - a seemingly stoned Ai wanders around the suburbs looking for her ex-lover (now married) in a white smock and a pair of yellow high heels. She lets fireworks off on someone's drive way, she falls off a ladder, she is serenaded by a mad old dame in a playground and hallucinates her tormentors. Then she goes back to work.

トパーズ
Dir. Ryu Murakami, 1992

Bodyguard Kiba

Even the most ardent Miike fan would struggle to salvage anything praiseworthy from this low-budget thriller come karate flick, hamstrung as it is by a muddy colour palette and poor production values. It may appeal to fans of martial arts, but personally I have no love for that genre.

The story is pretty cliched: small-time player Junpei betrays his Yakuza clan, the Soryu Group, and stashes away ¥500m before being arrested and doing 5 years in jail. After he is released, he aims to pick up where he left off with his old flame and recoup his ill-gotten gains, but realizing his former boss will be out for blood, he hires Dojo master Kiba to protect him. On returning to Tokyo, the Soryu Group's apparent kidnapping of his girlfriend leads him on a rescue mission that isn't quite all that it seems...

Any Yakuza film that features virtually no guns, where scores are settled by hand-to-hand combat, is pushing the bounds of credibility. That the villains then line up, one by one, to be round-housed into unconsciousness, just adds insult to injury. The film also has a very 80s feel to it, consummated in the faintly ridiculous final sequence, when the score bursts into a saxophone solo as the end credits roll.

ボディガード牙
Dir. Takashi Miike, 1993

Nobody Knows

Another graduate of the Cannes circuit, Nobody Knows is based on a real life event from the late Eighties where four children were abandoned by their mother and left to fend for themselves in their Tokyo apartment, with tragic consequences.

What I like about this film is its lightness of touch - it's a modern morality tale that resists melodrama, sentimentality and judgementalism almost entirely (the score too, generally eschews emotional manipulation), in lieu of an intimate portrait of the everyday existence of the four abandoned kids. The children all act very well, especially Yuya Yagira as 12-year old Akira, who impresses as the nominal head of the household, struggling to come to terms with his mother's neglect; forced to deal with an inner conflict between wanting a childhood for himself and assuming responsibility for his younger siblings. In the end, naivety engenders a slow descent into unpaid bills, squalor and malnutrition. When I say 'slow descent' though, it's painfully slow and that's really the film's Achilles' heel. It gives you time to really get to know the characters, but not much actually happens (until the bleak finale) - and with a running time of 2 hours 20 minutes, that means it frequently drags.

So despite being commendably realistic and refreshingly subtle in its execution, it's not a film I can imagine wanting to revisit any time soon.

誰も知らない
Dir. Koreeda Hirokazu, 2004

The Taste of Tea

Not exactly what I was expecting. From the title, and the fact it did the rounds at Cannes, I was expecting an Ozu rerun for modern times, but it's actually more akin to a Japanese version of Round the Twist - that gently surreal Antipodean kids show from the early 90s. The story, if it can properly be called a story, centres around an eccentric family in rural Japan; their individual lives and dreams, but also their place in the family unit.

It's not without its charms, and it probably does hit (hit is too strong, gently tap would be more apposite) on some basic truths about human nature, but ultimately Ishii's self-consciously wacky approach to direction left me feeling more irritated than heart-warmed. There's the zany grandpa with his preposterous barnet and bushy unibrow, the zany young girl, Sachiko, with her giant doppleganger (a sort of metaphorical guardian spirit perhaps), the zany boy, Hajime, and his awkward forays into romance. Maybe it's just the cynic me, but there's only so much good-natued zaniness I can take in one film.

茶の味
Dir. Katsuhito Ishii, 2004

Audition

Kiri... kiri... kiri...

Or in English, 'cut... cut... cut...', is the mantra for this groundbreaking psychological horror that brought Takashi Miike to the world's attention.

Of all the Miike films I've seen to date (and I have plenty still to see!), Audition remains my favourite - a great premise, complimented by unique imagery and set pieces which have now taken their rightful place in the horror hall of fame - the sack in the bare room with a ringing phone; the hypodermic needle, poised for unspeakableness... In traditional cinematic terms, it might be argued that it's a flawed film; with an overlong setup and confusing narrative, but I don't think traditional cinematic terms are applicable here. The three act structure, whilst just about discernible, seems redundant given that the whole latter half of the film, from the point where Aoyama first kisses Asami, is a brilliantly disorienting fusion of dream and reality; an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

From one of the earliest scenes, where Aoyama is seen reeling in the big catch, through to the final image of a mutilated man lying prone and helpless on the floor, the transition from hunter to hunted is expertly handled by Miike. I actually think the long setup - the audition process, Aoyama's courtship of Asami, his relationship with his family and co-workers - is a vital component in making his subsequent descent into darkness as effective as it is. It almost goes without saying that the cinematography is gorgeous throughout - typified by the judicious use of colour; from the flat tones of Aoyama's home and workplace through to the vivid colour filters used for the dream-like sequences at the abandoned dancing school and the Stone Fish bar in Ginza.

Audition is more disturbing than it is scary, but there are a couple of great jumps, both involving the sack in Asami's unkempt apartment. In Asami, Miike has created a modern day succubus - outward beauty concealing demonic rage; a creature of indeterminate age, identity, corporeality... some kind of sadistic shape-shifting automaton perhaps (surely impossible, but disconcertingly hinted at), with a stock set of lines and gestures she uses to reel in her prey. According to modern psychology, legends of succubi may be ascribed to the hallucinations brought on by sleep paralysis. In the denouement, Asami inflicts a literal paralysis on Aoyama, but he seems to have been sleep-walking into his fate from the moment he laid eyes on her photo, ignoring the warnings of his friend, Yoshikawa. Audition taps perfectly into the primal fear of The Uncanny; the horrible realization that something so familiar can be so strange. Truly insidious.

オーディション
Dir. Takashi Miike, 1999

Tokyo!

Three short films set in Tokyo, linked by a current of surrealism, and also by the fact that none of the directors are Japanese; a sense of being on the outside, looking in.

First up is a typically whimsical piece from Michel Gondry about a woman who transforms into a chair. It starts off quite slowly, with rather a mundane, albeit nicely acted setup - then throws you the curve ball you were expecting (it's Gondry!), before ending on an upbeat note. Slight, but I enjoyed it.

Carax's segment, Merde, is less successful. For all of it's superficial oddness, it fails to engage - the court sequence is particularly tedious. Carax's shock tactics aren't justified by what's on offer - it's not very funny and too lightweight for social satire. Capital punishment and xenophobia in Japan are contentious subjects and potentially interesting material for a film, but their treatment here is heavy-handed - not helped any by the less than subtle imagery of religious martyrdom.

This is counterpointed by an understated, gently satirical film from Joon-ho Bong, further underlining his status as one of the up and coming directors from South East Asia. Bong takes a sideways look at the peculiarly Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori (acute social withdrawal; the act of voluntarily excluding oneself from the outside world). The absurdity of the 'condition' - and on a wider level, Japan's social fragmentation - is highlighted by one man's earth-moving experience with a pizza delivery girl, following 10 years of solitary confinement in his apartment. A little gem.

Dir. Michel Gondry / Leos Carax / Joon-ho Bong, 2008

Virus

This probably doesn't have any place being on here as it's largely a film in English, but it's got a Japanese director and that's good enough for me! I'm not sure, but I suspect Virus was Fukasaku's attempt to make the transition into Hollywood. This rather cheap-looking B movie was never likely to make his name with a mainstream Western audience though. It's true to say that the intervening thirty years have not been kind to the film, but on top of that, it feels like a throwback to the Sixties, both in terms of its style and its themes.

The eponymous virus is really just a pretext for making a cold war movie; a cold war movie whose plot is frankly beyond laughable. After a global pandemic has destroyed most of the world's population, a small band of survivors gather in a scientific base in the Antarctic (the virus is dormant in cold conditions). Yoshizumi, an unassuming Japanese seismologist - and hero of the piece, somewhat predictably - warns that off-shore oil drilling and the weight of the sea has triggered tectonic movement, which will result in a massive earthquake off the east coast of the US. The magnitude of the earthquake will cause it to be registered by the ARS (Automatic Response System) as a nuclear attack (possibly a slight design flaw) and it will retaliate in kind - against the Soviets. The Soviets have a similar system in place, which, ironically, as well as targeting the US, is targeting the base in the Antarctic the survivors are stationed. Apparently oblivious to the fact that an earthquake measuring 9 on the richter scale would probably see the building housing the ARS and everything in its vicinity washed away in a tsunami of biblical proportions, Yoshizumi sets off with Major Carter on a mission to Washington to shut down the ARS before it's too late. But it is too late! The warheads have been launched. So the ultimate irony is that the 863 people who survive a virus responsible for wiping out the world's population are themselves wiped out by good old M.A.D.

If he had left it there, and let the credits roll amidst the billowing mushroom clouds, Virus might have garnered 2/5 for ridiculously audacious plot contrivance and for having some balls. As it is, Fukasaku tacks on a gooily sentimental epilogue, set 4 years into the future, which sees Yoshizumi, hobbling along, Christ-like, somehow having made it from Washington DC to Outer Mongolia, then having the further good fortune (a billion to one shot maybe) to chance upon the last enclave of humanity and be reunited with his long lost love. What a load of ARS.

Dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 1980