Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2019: A Beloved Wife, We Are Little Zombies, Flowers and Rain, Motel Acacia

Shin Adachi made waves in 2014 when he wrote the screenplay of the award winning 100 Yen Love, eventually serving as the country's submission to the best foreign film category of that year's Oscars. He has since directed his own feature film, 14 That Night, which premiered at the Tokyo IFF 2 years later. His second directorial feature, A Beloved Wife, is far more autobiographical compared to his earlier films - it's based on Adachi's novel Chibusa ni Ka. 

It's about a struggling screenwriter, Gota (Gaku Hamada) who finally catches a big break. He decides to go on a trip to the countryside for some inspiration, and brings along his daughter and his cantankerous wife Chika (Asami Mizukawa). The two of them don't exactly get along, and their personalities clash repeatedly. Both husband and wife have their frustrations: Chika hates her husband's lack of assertiveness and overall laziness, and Gota is frustrated by a lack of sexual contact. They probably should've separated ages ago, but there's something holding them together, something that - in spite of all the frustration and setbacks, is the basis of their unconventional love.

The casting in this film is perfect; Hamada really is suited to pathetic loser roles, a perfect mix of weirdly cute and pathetic at the same time. Mizukawa towers over him physically and in terms of presence, making her all the more imposing. Their interactions are great, and it felt a lot more natural and a lot less shrill compared to another Tokyo IFF film with similar themes, Miyamoto.

Makoto Nagahisa's We Are Little Zombies is a peculiar, formally creative exploration of grief and finding a place in this world, of growing up and the fickle nature of showbusiness.

Patterned like an oldschool videogame from the Famicom era, it charts how four children, now newly orphaned, processes their emotions (or lack thereof.) Searching for mementoes become quests. Defeating a boss means emotional catharsis. Upon completion of their individual quests, the four of them find solace in each other's lack of emotion and (what else?) form a band. Art is created from this peculiar lack of pain. But the pain is really there all along, and our intrepid group comes to learn that over the course of the film.

The film uses a lot of narrative techniques - continuous shots, RPG-style birds eye view shots, sprite graphics, surrealism, stop motion animation, split screens - but the real emotional resonance comes from the contrast of these scenes to something quieter and more somber, glimpses of real life events that break through these childrens' fantasies, hazy memories of the past, distorted by perceptions and time.

Based on rapper Seeda's album of the same name, Hana to Ame (Flowers and Rain) reads on the surface like a Japanese rendition of 8 Mile, where an aspiring rapper (who grew up in London, then moved to Japan) strives to be the very best at what he does.

The journey to that destination isn't easy, however, as the film detours into a long sequence where our protagonist deals drugs and gets into a lot of shady things before finding his groove.

A good rap song has a smooth rhythm and flow; good guidelines to abide by whether one is making a song or a film. But Flowers and Rain struggles to find that flow in its first half, stopping abruptly before potentially great moments. We hardly ever hear our protagonist rap at all until the very end, which would have sold him as someone competent and worthy of making it in the rap world. Instead, it's hard to empathize with him up until a certain point in the film. It's a decent effort, but it comes out a bit short in this case.

Set in a hypothetical dystopian USA, where Trump's vision of the Wall is a living reality and immigrants are on the run everywhere, Motel Acacia is a tense horror-thriller in the vein of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982). However, while it does tackle interesting concepts, and while the creature effects and production design of the film are top notch, the film's story doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny.

The film addresses issues of immigration, the effect of colonialist masters on our psyche, how we sacrifice our humanity for the sake of our loved ones, and at the film's root, our capacity to empathize with other people. This is a film very much rooted in the Trumpian era - his voice, or at least an approximation of it, is heard everywhere. Callousness and a tendency to dehumanize trickles down from the top to the bottom, from colonizer to colonized, one link in the hierarchical chain to another, until servant emulates the master too much and becomes him.

But the story of Motel Acacia works better as metaphors rather than anything realistic. Why are these people so desperate to cross the border, even though it's assumed that opportunities on the other side are non existent? Why did the motel owner do the thing he did? How could a woman survive a self inflicted wound that would have otherwise killed her? If you get into the details, a lot of the film doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Regardless, the film is a fine effort from all involved, and considering the quality of the design work at play, it's something to be proud of, at least in that regard.