Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: Tatsumi, Kubi, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

 

Tatsumi (Yuya Endo) works for an organized crime group as a cleaner - responsible for disposing dead bodies whenever one inevitably turns up in the course of their dirty work. One day, he is tasked to look for stolen drug money and the trail seems to lead him to his old friend Kyoko (Nanami Kameda) and her husband. It is there where he meets Kyoko's younger sister Aoi (Kokoro Morita), an irascible, brash woman who recognizes exactly zero authority. When tragedy befalls Kyoko and her husband, Tatsumi and Aoi find themselves on the run together, where they begin to form a strange relationship.

A relatively straightforward crime revenge drama, Shoji Hiroshi's Tatsumi is nevertheless well made, buoyed by excellent performances from an ensemble cast. Yuya Endo's Tatsumi is haunted by a tragic past, a good man driven to apathy by his circumstances. He finds himself drawn to Aoi, seeing something in his deceased brother in her. Kokoro Morita matches him beat for beat in that sense, her character evolving from a seemingly incorrigible punk to someone genuinely vulnerable and understood by only a few people. Among the rest of the ensemble, of particular note is Tomoyuki Kuramoto, who plays the film's primary antagonist Ryuji - a chaotic, menacing presence whenever he turns up.

The last act of the film ruminates on the nature of revenge itself - with a closing sequence not unlike films like Rae Red's Babae at Baril (2019) yet in a different context, its ambiguity something I particularly liked.

A headless corpse floating down a river and a small hill of severed heads bookend Kubi, Takeshi Kitano's retelling of the events surrounding the Honnoji incident - a series of events where Mitsuhide Akechi, retainer to the warlord Nobunaga Oda, betrays his lord and ends the demon king's rule. It is perhaps the film's tamest image, the entire film filled with severed heads. Yet at the same time, it is not nearly as serious as Kitano's other contemporary films - in many ways the film, perhaps Kitano's last, is a satirical deadpan comedy with tongue firmly in cheek, in this case, comedy that is pitch black. Indeed, in the credits Kitano uses his comedy stage name Beat Takeshi instead of his real name.

It is perfect that Kitano chose Hideyoshi Toyotomi as his character: as a retainer with a peasant background, Hideyoshi's perspective is unique - a commoner scoffing at the absurdities of samurai nobility - and by extension, perhaps Kitano himself looking at how jidaigeki of this era is portrayed. And absurd it is, often to insane degrees - this film's version of Nobunaga Oda, played by Ryo Kase, is chaos embodied, devious, perverse, often obsessed more with various hedonistic pursuits than actually ruling the land, treating his retainers like playthings - the head severed from the body in a figurative way, the head unaware of the body's machinations. 

Yet it could be argued that Kitano's avatar in this film is not merely Hideyoshi but Shinzaemon Sorori, a rakugoka associated with Hideyoshi. Here Shinzaemon is a former ninja, quitting that job and deciding to tell stories instead. In fact, near the end, he leaves the relevant battles entirely, reaching a rather unceremonious end. In fact, many of the characters of the film seem to reach their goals, only to have that attainment be pyrrhic in nature - Mitsuhide triumphs, but is later betrayed by Hideyoshi; Hideyoshi himself is triumphant, but his rule is soon ended by the next generation. Another peasant character, Mosuke, gains the status he so desperately wanted, only to reap the "benefits" of that new status as soon as it is achieved. All this can be seen as Kitano meditating on his own legacy (if he has one, at least in Kitano's view). In this case, the severed head gains a whole new meaning - in the context of the film, the severed head is a symbol of a duty completed, a success achieved. Hideyoshi (and by extension, Kitano) does not conclusively attain this. But perhaps in a moment of self reflection, Hideyoshi states that as long as he knows that his target is dead, it doesn't matter if he has a head or not. Kitano's decades-long career in the entertainment business may not end cleanly and not with whatever "ending" Kitano subconsciously thinks he needs, but he has done the work, and if Kubi does end up being his curtain call, his body of work, strange and funny and idiosyncratic, stands for itself.

My relationship as a fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto began when I was around 12 or 13, watching the WOWOW satellite channel in my grandmother's house. In a dull moment between other dull moments, I began to hear a musical piece that moved me like few other musical pieces did. It turned out to be a commercial for Sakamoto's Playing the Orchestra, and the musical piece was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the iconic theme from the 1983 film of the same name. I watched Playing the Orchestra, recorded it on VCR and watched it religiously over the years until the tape broke.

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In March of this year, Ryuichi Sakamoto died after a long fight with cancer. In his final months, he recorded a concert film along with his son Neo Sora, which would prove to be his last. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus to someone like me is more than a concert film - it is a final and tender goodbye to a man whose music has influenced me for the better part of 30 years.

The production is bare, stripped down, filmed in black and white - consisting only of Sakamoto, his piano, and a number of microphones. Sakamoto himself chose 20 songs to feature in this final performance, spanning all of his years from electronica, film soundtracks, and his later experimental and minimalist works.

The first third of the film consists of piano renditions from his later works: a couple of tracks from his 2017 album async and one from his iconic 1999 album BTTB, punctuated by the haunting main theme to the 2004 film Tony Takitani. For a moment I close my eyes and find myself at a Tower Records in Canada with my aunt and grandmother, buying a copy of BTTB and Sakamoto's concert album Discord. I ask the clerk if they have a copy of 1996 in stock; she tells me that the album is sold out. I spend nights listening to those two albums repeatedly.

The middle third of the film breaks my composure immediately, beginning with Bibo no Aozora, a track from his 1995 album Smoochy, whose orchestral version was famously used in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006). Tears began to fall from my eyes - Bibo no Aozora is perhaps my favorite of all of Sakamoto's songs. But something in this particular performance breaks me even more. Fans of Sakamoto know that in many instrumental renditions of Bibo no Aozora, there is a dissonant, improvisational segment. In this particular performance, Sakamoto struggles to find a chord he likes. He stops for a moment and tries again, He tries to squeeze out the chords he wants, but they aren't coming out. "Let's do it again," he says, but we move to another song. In many concert films there is an image of an artist at the peak of their powers, their performance perfect, iconic. But this is a concert film of an artist in his last days, exhausting his life force to will art into existence.

Bibo no Aozora is followed by another BTTB track: Aqua, the song to the iconic ending of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster. It's a melancholy yet hopeful piece. I gain my composure for the moment, though it cracks after reminiscing the devastating ending to that film.

After Aqua is the oldest of all the Sakamoto songs in this film: Tong Poo, a track he composed in his Yellow Magic Orchestra days. While the original track is fast and propulsive, this piano rendition is slow and elegiac. Sakamoto takes a few moments to play the opening part of this song, stops, then tries again. With the death of Sakamoto, of the three members of YMO, only Haruomi Hosono remains.

Sakamoto then goes into his greatest cinematic themes: his collaborations with controversial director Bernardo Bertolucci, themes from The Sheltering Sky (1990) and The Last Emperor (1987) and Peter Kosminsky's adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1992). These are interspersed with tracks from his later years. Of note is his piano rendition of Trioon, one of the songs he made along with German musician Alva Noto. In this rendition of Trioon, the electronica and glitches are absent: Sakamoto's piano feels so alone.

As his finale Sakamoto chooses the theme to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and I am 12 or 13 again, watching Sakamoto for the first time, entranced by his music. And I am in my 40s, crying in a Japanese theater, saying goodbye to a friend of sorts for the last time.

Opus' encore is the song of the same name from BTTB, a lilting, melancholic tune that is my favorite track from that album. And Neo Sora decides with his last frames to show that even without the man, the music will inevitably live on.

Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: On the Edge of Their Seats, Who Were We?

 

From a career making direct to video Pinku Eiga, Hideo Jojo has branched out to carve out a diverse filmography of everything from dramas to romantic films. Filmed and released on the cusp of the pandemic, Jojo's 2020 film On the Edge of their Seats is based on the play of the same name, and its theatrical elements are clearly evident in the final work. Taking place over the course of a baseball game we never see, the film follows four characters as they grapple with personal setbacks: Asuha (Rina Ono) is a member of the drama club, and her greatest dream to be able to participate in a national drama tournament has been derailed thanks to a classmate getting the flu right before the performance. Hikaru (Marin Nishimoto) is that classmate, and she's been thinking how to make it up to Asuha and the club. Fujio (Amon Hirai) left the baseball club realizing he'll never be selected to play for the team, even as classmates worse than him strive to do so and remain, and nerdy Miyashita (Shuri Nakamura) gets second place at the only thing she's good at - studying - as she is distracted by the team's star player.

In contrast to the usually hopeful and optimistic characters of these youth dramas, the characters of On the Edge of Their Seats are trapped by their own personal demons cynically declaring that the effort is simply not worth it. Ironically, it's the adults who engage in this unabashed optimism - or rather, dogged determination - embodied by the tea ceremony coach with dreams of baseball stardom, who screams himself hoarse trying to cheer on the school's baseball team.

In the end, these characters realize that a setback doesn't have to mean the end of the road, and an epilogue puts this in context, showing how insignificant these problems really are. Much like the ending of 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown, the titular character may not have gotten what he wanted, but the world keeps on spinning regardless.

A woman (Nana Komatsu) wakes up in the abandoned gold mines in the island of Sado, in Niigata. She does not know her name or even how she got there. She meets others like herself and chooses a new name: Midori (Green). Some time passes and she meets a man (Ryuhei Matsuda) who has arrived under the same circumstances. He calles himself Ao (Blue.) The two feel a strange connection, but are unsure what that connection is. As the two go about their motions around the island, they meet more people like them. One in particular, Murasaki (Shizuka Ishibashi,) feels a strange connection to Ao...

At one point in Tetsuya Tomina's Who Were We? the camera pans to what looks like a Noh performer wearing a mask denoting his status as a spirit. And that's basically what the film is: a modern-day, arthouse Noh play about two spirits who find themselves finding each other again in a limbo, denoted by the boxy 4:3 frame that imprisons them. It's rather appropriate that Tomina chose these mines as the place of their meeting and incarceration; the Sado mines were historically a place where criminals and other undesirables were made to work, until their death a prison that was physical as much as it was spiritual.

That said, in this tale of love divorced from memory, that disconnection in itself is the film's greatest weakness. We never do find out the answer to the question Who Were We? - indeed, the ending of the film posits that an answer is unnecessary. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to attach to the two central characters, despite the enormous talents of both Komatsu and Matsuda. At least for the two of them, the proceedings feel sterile and cold. Instead of concerning itself with the circumstances behind Midori and Ao's past, most of the film's languid running time concerns itself with the question Are We Even Alive? even though that question has already been answered half an hour in. Instead, the film's strengths lie in its side stories, where memory is far more evident: an elderly woman (Shinobu Otake) serves as Midori's mentor and works as a cleaning lady, perhaps living and reliving the last thing she ever did; and a young boy, Toru (Kabuki actor Sennosuke Kataoka) was driven to death for being effeminate, wishes to be reborn as a woman but is unable to die a second time to be reincarnated.

Ironically, even as the film declares that love is enough, memories of a relationship, of a place now abandoned, of things left unsaid, give that love meaning. While I appreciate the intent of Who Were We? it tends to be too elusive for its own good.

Japan Musings 2023

I've come back to Japan for the first time since the pandemic started. This was not an unplanned on the whim moment; circa 2019, my then-fiancée and I wanted to get married and go here for our honeymoon. We'd saved up the money after a few years of frugal living. The planned dates would have been March 2020 for the wedding (no lavish ceremonies, just a small gathering) and October for the honeymoon. Guess how that went.

Here are a few things I did before going to this year's Tokyo International Film Festival:

My relationship with the movies of Shunji Iwai began with me watching his 1996 film Swallowtail on the Japanese satellite channel WOWOW with no subtitles. Chunks of the film were in English and the story was relatively easy to understand, so even for Japanese illiterate me in the early 2000s it was not a problem. More than two decades later, with a slightly higher level of Japanese and still with no subtitles, I watched his latest film, Kyrie no Uta (or simply Kyrie) in a Osaka cinema.

Spanning more than a decade, the film intercuts between at least four separate timelines: in the present day, Kyrie (Aina the End) is a homeless busker living life hand to mouth. She meets Ikko (Suzu Hirose), an old friend who decides to become her manager and give her a break in showbiz. Many years ago, Kyrie and Ikko were friends, but with different names; Kyrie was Luca and Ikko was Maori. Both are connected with Natsuhiko (Hokuto Matsumura), who himself is connected with another Kyrie - Luca's sister, who was his girlfriend prior to an unspeakable tragedy that would upend all of their lives.

Each character deals with that tragedy, whose shockwaves reverberate across the years. While soft-spoken Kyrie expresses her grief through song, Natsuhiko can't even express it much at all, and Ikko withdraws in another way, living a relatively carefree life without abandon. It's all told in the sort of dark fairytale Iwai's been known for, with quirky characters in the vein of Swallowtail, fractured temporally in the vein of his 2001 opus All About Lily Chou Chou, yet done as a musical chronicle of struggling artists, much in the vein of his 2010 screenwriting effort Bandage and examination of personal and national traumas as in his documentary Friends After 3.11 (2011). Indeed, this is perhaps Iwai's first true musical, with former idol group member Aina the End at times sounding like a huskier, vulnerable Chara with songs composed and produced by frequent Iwai collaborator Takeshi Kobayashi.

That said, this is perhaps one of Iwai's weaker contemporary offerings. The three hour cut of the film feels slight despite its length; some segues feel more like bloat rather than worldbuilding, and based on the impressions of the two hour cut of the film, it seems like the editing of the film was a persistent problem. 

Still, the last few sequences are magic, filled with the energy and emotion that I love so much from Iwai. Kyrie and Ikko travel to the beach where the tragedy began. "Are you afraid of the tsunami?" Ikko asks her friend. Kyrie says no. The grief is still there in some form, but the fear and anger has all but washed away.

Ever since I heard about Toei Kyoto Studio Park, I've always wanted to go. The theme park is also a large film set, used in many Jidai-geki (period dramas) and even music videos. Parts of the park were even used to film scenes from the live action Rurouni Kenshin movies. For a fee, visitors can dress up in colorful costumes and roam around the park and take pictures.

I'm not usually a fan of cosplay and dressing up, but I had to take this chance. There are also other attractions in the park, including a showcase of Kamen Rider costumes from the Heisei era onwards, a museum of Toei productions from the fifties onward, and an expansive movie library of Toei films. For movie lovers, it's worth a whole day trip.

Here's a costume worn by legendary actress Misora Hibari:

Here's a wall of posters

And finally, in the old Japanese capital of Kamakura, my wife and I watched some Noh and Kyogen in a small theater. Many of the readers of this blog probably know what Noh is: one of the oldest forms of theater in the world still being practiced today, it is a play based on traditional Japanese literature, often depicting a spirit, ghost or otherwise supernatural being. Kyogen is a separate art form to Noh, mostly comedic vignettes meant as interludes in between Noh performances.

The performance we watched consisted of one Noh play and one Kyogen performance. The Kyogen performance, Futari Daimyo, is a short tale about two Daimyo or feudal lords who go out on a walk. They force what seems like a hapless man to carry their swords for them, even though the man has his own business to attend to. As a sort of revenge, the man takes matters into his own hands in rather comedic fashion.

The Noh play performed was called Shunzei Tadanori. Taira no Tadanori was a poet and general during the Heian period of Japan. If you've read this blog a certain amount, or have some knowledge of Japanese history, you'd know that the Taira were all but annihilated by the end of the Genpei War by the Minamoto clan. The play recounts his defeat at the hands of Okabe no Rokuyata and the discovery of his body, identified by a poem attached to his quiver. Okabe visits Tadanori's teacher, the poet Fujiwara Shunzei, to deliver the news, when Tadanori's spirit visits him.

Noh plays often depict tragic events, and in my view, here it seems to be the fear of one's second death via forgetting, and living on via one's art. Tadanori begs Shunzei to include his poems, this time without the mark of anonymity, so that he can live on. In a way, even if the body has passed on and decayed, Tadanori will be remembered, just like in his famous poem:

In ruins now, the old capital Shiga by the waves,
yet the wild cherries of Naga still bloom as before.

JFF+ Independent CInema Reviews: A Muse Never Drowns, Bachiranun, Follow the Light

 

Art binds us together in many different ways. It helps us experience times and places long gone, it helps us move on, it helps us communicate feelings that are deeply held. Nozomi Asao’s debut feature film is a love story, yes, but perhaps not in the way one expects.

A Muse Never Drowns begins with a frustrated Sakuko (Miku Uehara), a student who aspires to go to an art college. The problem is, she isn’t finding much inspiration with her drawings. Sakuko is accidentally pushed by a classmate as she draws on a pier, and the image of a soaked Sakuko catches the eye of art prodigy Saibara (Kogarashi Wakasugi), who eternalizes the moment into an (in)famous painting. Of course, Saibara has her own reasons for drawing Sakuko in the first place.

Many have drawn comparisons with this film and Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2018) in terms of its story similarities and its exploration of gaze. But this film diverges from those similarities in significant ways – it can be said that A Muse Never Drowns concerns itself with artists and art: that is, in how we draw upon our own lives in the creation of art. Sakuko may not be an experienced painter, but in response to the many impending changes in her life – a new sibling and an impending relocation that threatens to separate her from her friends – she begins to sculpt a boat out of junk lying at home. She appropriates various things, takes them apart and puts them together, and it brings her joy. And of course, boats are hardy, able to withstand even the strongest typhoons, able to move from place to place. “She’s always been a tinkerer,” her father tells his wife. Sakuko isn’t a bad artist, she’s just suited for a different medium. 

Saibara’s motivations, on the other hand, fall more into her own unexplored feelings for Sakuko and the insane pressure she has put upon herself after her first painting. Her own doubts and insecurities are preventing her from accepting her art, blemishing an otherwise perfect work. “I can’t make anyone happy,” she tells a mutual friend.

It is when Sakuko and Saibara come to terms with their own reasons for taking up art – either to find one’s self or just to find something to do – that they overcome their insecurities on why they want to do what they want in the first place. Sakuko later asks her father if doing a hobby for a living, asking if artistic pursuits contribute to anything meaningful. He answers her that hey, “it’s got to be worth a try.”

A Muse Never Drowns is a wonderful love story where art itself is the object of affection – in creating it, in finding your own meaning in it, in sharing that meaning with the one you love.

Yonaguni is the westernmost inhabited island of Japan, only a short distance away from Taiwan. It has a language that is distinct from Japanese and is spoken by around a few hundred people. 

In the Yonaguni language (Dunan Munui), "bachiranun" means "never forget." And in Yonaguni native Aika Higashimori's debut film of the same name, she takes that phrase to heart: devoid of plot and composed mainly of various scenes and vignettes of island life, Bachiranun exists as a memory of a place slowly fading. 

Higashimori blends documentary footage of Yonaguni island residents going about their day with fictional elements and striking visuals: a post box in the middle of a river, delivering life-giving water. Bones in a hollow pit. Tattoos passing from one hand to another - the "torch" of memory lighting another. "I wonder if you will remember us," one woman tells the other. It's a question left up in the air, though this film itself, as an externalization of memory, may be the answer.

There are also accounts by various Yonaguni islanders, including Higashimori's grandmother, of a history of oppression and how disparate cultures are marginalized and homogenized into the whole. "Our people are on the verge of death," she sings. They used to do rituals all the time, but the younger generation no longer does such things. The idea brings Higashimori to tears.

Near Yonaguni Island, under its bountiful waters, there is a stone monument or pyramid.  Near that is one shaped like a turtle, perhaps a deity once worshipped and now long forgotten. Turtles feature prominently in Bachiranun, a symbol of the enduring presence of the divine even when no one remembers. Near the end, a woman tells the turtle, "remember that the road has holes and gravel; we have no choice but to walk." It's a hopeful statement, one that considers the act of remembering as an earnest, perseverant prayer; a dream of one's self, etched forever.

How do we face the inevitable death of a dying land? Do we escape from it and hide in our own fantasies? Do we give in and let the light fade out? Or do we keep the flame burning, no matter how faint?

Akira (Tsubasa Nakagawa) feels like an alien, a stranger in a strange land. Following the failure of his father's musical career in Tokyo and a messy divorce, father and son return to their hometown in Akita to start anew. Akira has trouble fitting in, and his classmates won't be there for long: because of rampant rural depopulation, the only middle school in the area closing in a month, give or take. During one aimless day, he comes across a mysterious girl (Itsuki Nagasawa) standing on a rooftop. He meets and forms a connection with the girl, Maki, and finds out more behind her strange circumstances.

The appearance of a UFO serves as the catalyst to the events of Yoichi Narita's Follow the Light. Its mysterious light reaches people all throughout the sleepy town in which it is set: Akira's teacher (Rina Ikoma) feels helpless towards her students as the town grows even more desolate - during a tense nomikai, her distraught coworkers cannot help but lament the end of their school. Maki's uncle and adoptive father is on the verge of selling his land and farming equipment because there simply isn't any profit to gain from it, and Akira's own father becomes a public servant to give a fighting chance to the people of the town, even though opportunities are growing scarce.

Follow the Light is a tribute to the idea of furusato - a word that connotes one's hometown mixed with a warm feeling of nostalgia... Or rather than just a tribute, perhaps a tribute to the idea of furusato persevering - in the memories of those who leave, and through the actions of those who stay. Even in the bleakest of times, even when the end seems inevitable - as long as one "follows the light" and lives on, it's more than enough.

Thematically the film shares many facets with the earlier Bachiranun - in that while the film's ending has its characters facing an uncertain future, it's also full of hope. And while all things inevitably pass into memory, that "place" will always remain in the hearts of the people who lived there and shared that moment together.

***

The JFF+ Independent Cinema Festival is available, for free at: https://jff.jpf.go.jp/watch/ic2023/films/ until the end of October.