ryuganji: film news from japan

Japanese audiences will get their chance to see Asano Tadanobu’s take on Genghis Khan before most of the world when “Mongol” opens here on April 5th, in direct competition with J.J. Abramzilla’s “Cloverfield” and cutie du jour Kaho’s manga musical “Utatama”. Although Sergei Bodrov’s long-awaited biopic missed out on winning this year’s Oscar for best foreign language film, its nomination and its star’s heavily-reported trip to the award show with wife Chara brought about far greater media exposure and a much better chance of a decent box office run.

Coming back down to earth after his Hollywood adventure, Asano has just finished work on a follow-up to his directorial debut “Tori” with an instalment for the digital omnibus film “R246 Story“, a mixture of drama and documentary using the connecting motif of Route 246, a national highway that stretches from Tokyo and toxically past my place all the way to Shizuoka. Joining Asano behind the camera are an odd mix of participants: actors Nakamura Shido and Santamaria Yusuke, former MMA fighter and all-round renaissance man Sudo Genki, and pop rappers Verbal from M-Flo and Illmari from Rip Slyme. Naturally, the weirdness doesn’t end there.

Asano’s contribution is “224466″, a sci-fi fantasy where he plays an E.T. from a rock’n'roll planet who’s lost his crucial drum kit and is beginning to weaken. An old man named Torakichi (Kase Ryo) and a wee girl called Shidomi (Omori Ayane) come to his aid and try to track down the one person who knows where the drum kit is: Osho (Nagase Masatoshi). To get the info out of him, Shidomi has to engage in a guitar battle with a boy axe wizard… Arai Hirofumi and Toyohara Kosuke also appear and the script is by, who else, Aoyama Shinji.

Nakamura also dabbles in the fantastic and ridiculous for his “Jiroru: Densetsu no Yo-na-o-shi”. “Jiroru” mixes the name of the legendary folk hero Jirocho with that of rock god Yazawa Eikichi’s long-defunct greaser band Carol, to whom Nakamura pays homage to in this film, while the rest of title means something along the lines of “Legendary “Revolution”. Jirocho (Matoba Koji) returns to his own time after a journey to the present and calls on his underling Mori no Iwamatsu (Nakamura). He tells him that the youth of the future are idiots who have no idea that route 246 is connected to his hometown of Shimizu and are labouring under the misconception it’s a national highway. What’s more, they have no concept of duty, humanity, honour, or rock’n'roll. He orders Iwamatsu to take the Jirocho family Cadillac back to the future to put things right. Osugi Ren and Nakamura Yuri also feature, and “Honey and Clover” scribe Kawahara Masahiko provides the screenplay.

More alien antics abound in “Arifureta Kisho” (literally ‘A Commonplace Homecoming’) from Sudo, who handles directing, acting, and writing duties in conjunction with Fukihara Kota. A group of young men carrying out a traffic survey of UFO hotspot route 246 rally around Inoue (Sudo) when they learn he’s taken the job to search for a lost lover. His sketch and description of her is vague and nearly incomprehensible, but the others decide to do the best they can with it. Then Inoue suddenly announces he has to return to his family home, and says he’s giving up the search… Tsuda Kanji, Mashima Hidekazu and Hayashi Yudai also star.

Zainichi Korean MC Verbal takes a different tack with “Dead Noise”, a documentary on the future of Japanese hip-hop exploring ideas of Japanese culture and identity through a series of interviews with major figures in the game.

Meanwhile Ilmari, indisputably the world’s top Finnish-Japanese rapper, sticks with fiction in his “Club 246″. Juri (Ishida Takuya) is a shy, strictly average kid who can’t get his mind off Saki (Haru), a popular chick who inhabits the local hip-hop nightclubs. Making an effort to bust out of his shell, he ventures into a club for the first time in his life but is shocked to discover what awaits him.

Finally, Santamaria Yusuke sets himself up with Nagasaku Hiromi for his relationship drama “Bento Fufu” (literally ‘Packed Lunch Couple’). An unmarried couple whose comfortable life together has grown stale. Eating packed lunches together is their everyday routine, but the more accustomed to each other they become they less they communicate. As the man sits unable to break the silence, the woman’s frustration reaches boiling point.

“R246 Story” opens from late August. There’s some good pics from the production announcement and a still from Nakamura Shido’s Yaji-Kita-ish effort here.

Finally, staying with the rock theme, no self-respecting Asano acolyte needs me to tell them that his album “Cry and Laugh” is available from Amazon Japan. That cover owes more than a little to Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” video if you ask me though. But you didn’t.

Ever dreamed of becoming a hipster indie movie star? Then here’s your chance, courtesy of Ishii Katsuhito and his Nice Rainbow cohorts. Their “Nice Workshop” sets out to train ten hopeful actors in the style of screen acting favoured by film, TV and commercial directors of the NR ilk. Successful applicants will have to pay 200,000 yen for the privilege of attending twelve sessions taught by the likes of Ishii, Miki Shunichiro, Aniki and Yuuuka Ooosumi (ooh, with all those vowels she must be just as quirky!), as well as unnamed members of “The Taste of Tea” director’s regular repertoire of actors.

The real reason for bringing this up is that workshop graduates will be cast primarily in a series of short films initially for the web to be directed by Ishii et al. Nothing concrete to pass on about those yet though, so stay tuned.

As mentioned in my “Kabei - Our Mother” review, Ishii’s next feature is “Yama no Anata - Tokuichi no Koi”, a remake of Shimizu Hiroshi’s “Anma to Onna” (The Masseurs and a Woman) that’s slated to open on May 24th. Jason Gray via Logboy now has word that “Anma to Onna” and several other Shimizu films are about to become available in that rarest of guises: Japanese DVD box sets with English subtitles. The first one is out on April 25th, and the second, subtitled “Children”, arrives on June 27th and includes “Children in the Wind”, “Nobuko”, “Mikaeri no To” and “Four Seasons of Children”. Shochiku also have a partial list of his films in English here.

I was just cleaning out my RSS reader of all the links I hadn’t had time to post over the last couple of weeks when this article reminded me of this trailer I saw before “Riaru Oni Gokko” (review coming soon). It’s for Unifrance’s Festival du Film Francais au Japon, screening at Toho Cinema’s Roppongi Hills and Nanba locations from the 13th, is shot on location in Paris and features festival guest Sophie Marceau (who also directs) as well as a very special guest star from the clan MacLeod. The two are supposedly an item after working on “La Disparue de Deauville” (Trivial), which just so happens to be the festival’s opening film. This is what she’s saying in the trailer, according to the Japanese subs:

Do you like films?
I love them too.
Films are my life.
I made my debut in “La Boum” in 1980.
I was still just a little girl.
I travelled so much with this film,
as well as to Japan, where I was warmly welcomed.
That bond continues even today.
From then on, I’ve acted in many films.
This time I’m here to introduce “La Disparue de Deauville”.
It’s the opening film of this year’s Festival du Film Francais au Japon.
Several other films will also be screened.
Many directors and actors will be coming to Japan for it.
The festival will be held at Toho Cinemas from March 13th!
So, let’s enjoy March together!

If only other festivals had the dosh to blow on lavish promotions like Unifrance obviously do. Maybe TOKYO FILMeX should get Kitano and Terajima Susumu to film a promo in the dodgy end of Asakusa. The Asahi profiles the fest here.

Back in Japan again after another trip home for my Dad’s funeral. The morning after I got back I headed to my hood multiplex to check out ‘Kabei‘, which was preceded by a shitload of Shochiku trailers including a new one for Ishii Katsuhito’s forthcoming trip down memory lane “Yama no Anata: Tokuichi no Koi”. Unfortunately, it looks like you might want to downgrade your expectations a little. It offered smidgens of dialogue and further glimpses of the cast and the mountain resort sets, which look convincingly authentic but still somehow have that hyper-real Ishii feel to them. Less heartening was the tone displayed in Kusanagi Tsuyoshi’s performance as Tokuichi, the blind masseur of the title. Even though the SMAP idol has been the most reliable of his groupmates in his screen outings to date such as Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s “Séance” and Shiota Akihiko’s “Yomigaeri: Resurrection”, here he seems to be playing a gurning caricature with exaggerated mannerisms at odds with the naturalistic approach practiced by the likes of Kase Ryo and Miura Tomokazu. Still, it’s too early to write the film off yet so don’t take my initial apprehension too seriously.

With violent crime and social disintegration showing no signs of abating, the birthrate shrinking and the population greying, nostalgia for a supposedly simpler and kinder age has become a conspicuous element of several recent popular narratives such as the “Always” films, the multimedia “Granny Gabai” franchise and the first instalment in a prospective series from Shochiku starring Oda Yuji and set in the Tsukiji fish markets due later this year. By default, Yamada Yoji’s “Kabei - Our Mother” might be seen as falling into this sentimental sub-genre on account of his reputation as a populist filmmaker and its wartime setting, but this film sets itself apart by forgoing the requisite retro-beautification of period society. Perhaps unsurprisingly because of the filmmaker’s humanist sympathies, the wartime Japan he depicts is domineeringly paternal, more concerned with the wellbeing of the state than its citizens. Conversely, this is Yamada’s paean to an idealized conception of Japanese motherhood, and its avatar here, the evergreen Yoshinaga Sayuri.

One of Nikkatsu’s top stars in the 1960s, Yoshinaga specialised in romantic comedies and provided a valuable antidote to the studio’s testosterone-heavy action output, helping to diversify their audience. Her steadfastly loyal fans are known as “Sayurists”, and despite a career slump during the 70s when her pure image was at odds with the prevailing provocative zeitgeist, her enduring popularity has enabled her to enjoy an unusually long-lived career for an actress, with most of her work these days coming from commercials and films. Here she stars in an adaptation of frequent Kurosawa Akira collaborator Nogami Teruyo’s non-fiction novel “Requiem for a Father”, which recounts the author’s experiences growing up during World War II.

As Japan’s military expansion into Asia brings it closer to war with the allied forces, German literature scholar Nogami Shigeru (Bando Mitsugoro) is arrested for breaching the Peace Preservation Act, tearing him away from his wife Kayo (Yoshinaga), nicknamed ‘Kabei’, and young daughters Hatsuko (Shida Mirai) and Teruyo (Sato Miku). Forced to raise the girls in increasingly difficult times, the soft-spoken but stalwartly resilient Kayo is aided by her husband’s earnest former pupil Yamazaki (Asano Tadanobu), her artistic younger sister-in-law Hisako (Dan Rei), and a sympathetic neighbourhood leader (Denden) who finds her a job as an elementary school teacher. Her unyielding dedication to her husband as he languishes in prison provokes the ire of her stern status-conscious police official father and the disdain of others in the community, but she soldiers on regardless at great personal cost for her family’s sake.

Yoshinaga’s Kabei is less a flesh-and-blood character with her own flaws and desires and more an archetype, a perfect and selfless fulcrum around which more complex and interesting characters revolve. In that sense she’s another in a long line of Yamada’s “madonnas”, generally virtuous objects of adoration for hapless male protagonists. His characterisation of Kayo as a beatific martyr might have come across as mere male romanticism if it weren’t such a palpably heartfelt eulogy to a generation of mothers and wives, and had his lead actress not have been such an icon of Japanese femininity. Apart from some confusion about exactly how old Yoshinaga’s character is supposed to be (the actress herself is in her sixties), it’s difficult to imagine another actress who could fit Yamada’s image of the character better as she virtually oozes oestrogen and motherly reassurance while Asano’s bumbling young gentleman, chastely besotted with Kayo, and Shofukutei Tsurube’s rough-as-guts country uncle with a heart and mouth full of gold provide more tangibly human foils. Performances uniformly maintain a fine balance between the dramatic and the real, and Shida as sensitive teenager Hatsuko shows particular promise for the future, having already made her big break in a dubious TV series about a pregnant 14-year-old.

While Yamada may be Japan’s reigning maestro of melodrama, there are no teary histrionics or clumsily signposted messages here (his few lapses are an occasional plaintive soprano accompaniment and a rather maudlin self-written poem recited over the end credits). Filmed almost exclusively on an evocative and intimate open set with few visual flourishes but yeoman workmanship, the film’s focus rests intently on the human drama and packs all the more punch for it. Although he still has his detractors and some critics are reluctant to mention him in the same breath as his more esteemed contemporaries, the assurance with which he propels the characters through 132 genuinely moving minutes without resorting to crude emotional manipulation is ample evidence of his mastery of the genre and the failings of his erstwhile successors. Even a recent popular and critical success like Lee Sang-il’s Yamada-esque “Hula Girls” had to have its characters give a succession of blubbery speeches in order to bludgeon its point home.

Apart from Kayo’s indeterminable age, there was only one other thing that had me scratching my head: although Yamada retains the names of the Nogami family for the characters, for some reason the adult Teruyo played by Toda Keiko becomes a high school art teacher rather than one of the most renowned women in the Japanese film industry. Maybe being Kurosawa’s script supervisor wasn’t proletarian enough?