Quote: The star of this documentary is a quintessential Imamura heroine: a hard-nosed, ruthless survivor, with a sense of loyalty and an earthy sense of humor. In this movie, she sits in a Tokyo bar, which she used to own, and tells the story of the various means she used to survive, beginning with the day the atom bomb fell. It is a history of compromises and hard deeds, though there are few outright betrayals.
Comment from Cinematheque Ontario: “One of the most powerful and brilliant films dealing with the Second World War and its aftermath” (Joan Mellen). As the provocative title suggests, Imamura is scornful of “the official story.” He approaches history not as a record of great events, but as a story experienced and narrated by a common (if unusual) person: Madame Onboro, a woman who bought a bar in Yokusaka, the setting of Imamura’s PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS, and who married an American soldier. The hostess’s commentary about her life after the war is intercut with newsreel footage that often contradicts her account of the American Occupation, and with a portrait of her daughter who is following in her footsteps. A typical Imamura heroine in her earthy humour and ruthless self-interest, Madame Onboro is bigger than life. (Her brutally pragmatic comments about her American husband are hilarious.) When she shows signs of falling in love with Imamura, her interviewer, the film becomes, like A MAN VANISHES, a complex “semi-fiction.”
Quote: Mother love gets the Shinya Tsukamoto treatment in the Japanese auteur’s latest mindfuck, a boldly abrasive, sometimes overwhelming tour of an unbalanced psyche. Said psyche belongs to a young, single mother (played by J-pop star Cocco) who imagines sinister doppelgangers lurking everywhere, stabs potential suitors with forks, lacerates her skinny arms with razors (“I cut my body to confirm it,” she muses in voiceover) and, above all, turns any activity involving her toddler son into grueling bouts of hysteria. Only singing seems to soothe her, and one of her songs catches the attention of a masochistic novelist (Tsukamoto) who’s willing to let her beat him into a bloody pulp in order to forge a relationship with her. Filmed with a reeling, zooming camera, scratchily edited, and set to a deafening cacophony of enfant shrieks and industrial noise, this virtuoso bit of grisliness may have something to say about violence-saturated societies nurturing Medea fantasies, but any thematic exploration plays second fiddle to Tsukamoto’s insistence on sheer sensory overload.
Quote: Here is the 1935/1936 original version of “An Actor’s Revenge”, which was hugely popular at that time and a high point in Kazuo Hasegawa’s career. In fact, he even chose to remake this film as his 300th film work, helmed by Kon Ichikawa.
The original film has 3 parts and runs 310 mins long, released. However, like most pre-1945 jidaigeki, it has been seized and re-edited by GHQ during the occupation era. And now, only this truncated version which runs only 97 mins exists.
Photographer Satoshi has become famous while working among the rhich and famous. His photos are worh a million. But the young man dreams of taking photos of Canadian landscapes instead of working in the studio with the same people all the time. His dreams fall to pieces when he gets a job working with model Shingo. All his anger is targeted at Shingo’s girlfriend, who is staying at Satoshi for some time. Satoshi’s neighbour Nanao overhears their whole converstation. Florist Nanao has a dream herself: She wants to go to France and studies French language very hard. This is then overheard by Satoshi. Little by little the two start listening more and more to the sound of their neighbour.
One of the most important artists of our era, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s career spans from techno-pop stardom to Oscar-winning composer and anti-nuclear activist. This intimate portrait explores Sakamoto’s return to music following a cancer diagnosis, leading to the creation of a haunting new masterpiece.Mubi wrote: Fresh from its run in cinemas, Coda: Stephen Nomura Schible’s revelatory exploration of Ryuichi Sakamoto, his work, and his incredible album async. This lovely and graceful exploration offers a rare glimpse into the artistic process of the renowned musician.
Yasujirô Ozu wrote: One could say this is the flip side of I Graduated, But… The student-protagonist scribbles his crib notes on his shirt sleeve, but the day of his graduation exam, the girl at his boarding house unwittingly takes the shirt to the launderette So naturally, he flunks. However, those who pass and graduate in high spirits cannot land any job, while the ones who flunked can continue to bum around living off their parent’s money. It’s a vignette. Although Ryu Chishu has appeared in my previous films, it was the first time I let him have a go at a more significant role.
A full description of the film can be found in James Quandt’s edited collection of writings on (and by) Ichikawa Kon from the Cinemateque Ontario (in Sato Tadao’s essay “Kon Ichikawa” on pages 109 – 111). A Billionaire was one of a handful of 50s comedies that Ichikawa directed that were extremely successful at the box office. These films were characterized by rapid-fire dialogue and biting social commentary (others like this include Pu-San and Mr Lucky). This is definitely a period of Ichikawa’s career that deserves more focus from the West.
Dysfunctional family and culture run amok in Toilet, which had an absolutely packed house last night at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and had many of the cast & crew in attendance at the screening. The film certainly has it’s Toronto roots showing as it was filmed here (although it’s actually set in the US), with familiar faces & locations on screen. We follow a family through a dysfunctional and eccentric set siblings Ray, Lisa and Maury and their grandmother from Japan, however a language barrier exists between the generations. It’s not the only barrier here as there are strong emotional barrier in each of the characters, all of whom have their own issues to work though. It’s an interesting tale of the individual journeys with the collective family journey, which although unintended become completely intertwined.
Quote: Hou’s latest film continues in a similar vein Cafe Lumiereof hermetic environment and translucently slight narrative that have come to define his later, apolitical (and largely transitional) works (beginning with The Flowers of Shanghai). Opening with the reassuringly familiar sight of the Mount Fuji Shochiku logo that can be seen at the beginning of many of Yasujiro Ozu’s films as well as a train traversing a horizon demarcated by power lines at dusk, Café Lumière then sharply diverges from Ozu’s familiar camerawork and images of Japan in the film’s inherent asymmetry, aesthetically irregular compositions, awkward angles (during the parents’ visit in Yoko’s apartment, Hou seemingly attempts an Ozu-like low angle then, faced with a troublesome, truncated image of the stepmother standing in the foreground, inexplicably pans up to reveal her face before resuming the low angle), and opaque and unengaging characters (except for Yoko’s stepmother, played by Kimiko Yo). Ostensibly centered on a struggling young writer (and impending single mother) named Yoko (Yo Hitoto) and her distanced relationships with the people around her (including an introverted bookstore owner named Hajime (Tadanobu Asano)), Hou resorts to familiar devices of expounding minimal narrative through telephone conversations, overdistilled ellipses (to the point of incoherence), and distended temps morts. By transposing his recurring themes of rootlessness and fractured families from Taiwan to Japan, Hou forgoes the entrenched historical mooring of his earlier films to create a more abstract – and personally less compelling, familiarly coded (if not formulaic) – image of contemporary urban alienation.
Synopsis Departures follows Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved and who is suddenly left without a job. Daigo decides to move back to his old hometown with his wife to look for work and start over. He answers a classified ad entitled “Departures,” thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency only to discover that the job is actually for a “Nokanshi” or “encoffineer,” a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life. While his wife and others despise the job, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of “Nokanshi,” acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, between the departed and the family of the departed. The film follows his profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy and meaning of life and living.
– Acadamy Award Winner : Best Foreign Language Film – 10 Academy of Japan Cinema Awards (including best film and best director)
Quote: On a ship en route to the Sado Islands, Tora-san enjoys the company of a beautiful woman (Miyako Harumi), unaware that she’s a famous enka singer traveling incognito. In this variation on Roman Holiday (1953), the enka star enjoys Tora-san’s company when her boyfriend left her. Eventually, she returns to her glamorous life, but not before surprising everyone in Shibamata by showing up to give Tora-san a ticket to her latest concert. Tora-san thought that this could be a good start, but she finally tells him that… her boyfriend is back.
Nagisa Oshima’s groundbreaking film opens with young, attractive Mako and her friend hitching a ride from an old man. After her friend leaves, the man tries to rape her, and she is saved only by the handsome Kiyoshi. Later, against the background of the tumultuous 1960 U.S./Japan Security Treaty demonstrations, Kiyoshi and Mako walk along a grungy seaside lumberyard while talking about sex. He attempts to kiss her, she slaps him, and he throws her in the water. She cries out that she can’t swim. When she continues to refuse his advances, he steps on her fingers as she clings to a log. Kiyoshi then saves Mako from a trio of seedy pimps looking to impress her into working for them, but after rescuing her, he forces himself on her again. With this unlikely beginning, Kiyoshi and Mako form a passionate though doomed romance. Soon she stops going to school and moves into his flea-ridden dive of an apartment. Utterly disillusioned with all trappings of societal convention, the two get cash by blackmailing businessmen and by shaking down Kiyoshi’s middle-aged sugarmama. Tension with this Bonnie and Clyde duo builds after Mako has an abortion in a run down clinic, performed by an alcoholic doctor. (Allmovie)
In the film’s chaotically fragmented and disorienting opening sequence, an over-animated, carefree adolescent student named Makoto (Kuwano Miyuki) recklessly runs up alongside a series of randomly selected vehicles caught in traffic and uses her disarming joviality to engage the unsuspecting driver into a polite, subtly flirtatious conversation before to attempting to ingratiate herself into obtaining a free ride home. However, as the anonymous driver soon diverts his automobile from the familiar main roads and onto the obscured, seedier alleys leading to the tawdrily ornamented love motels of the city’s pleasure quarters, complacency turns to anxiety as the instinctually sobered Makoto demands the driver to pull over the side of the road and hurriedly begins to walk away before being captured and overpowered by her unrelenting aggressor. A passerby dressed in a student uniform named Kiyoshi (Kawazu Yusuke) witnesses the violent encounter and immediately comes to the aid of the young woman. Having beaten and effectively subdued the middle-aged driver, Kiyoshi begins to coerce the humiliated offender into accompanying him to the police station in order to report the crime. In a desperate bid to stave off public embarrassment and avoid certain prosecution, the man attempts to buy Makoto and Kiyoshi’s silence with a handful of money, a momentary diversion that allows him to wrest free from Kiyoshi and escape. But Makoto’s circumstances would prove to be equally vulnerable as her rescuer now exploits the opportunity to violate the young woman (in a dysfunctional interrelationship that would be similarly revisited in Oshima’s subsequent film, Violence at Noon).
Traumatized by the incident and conflicted about Kiyoshi’s subsequent behavior, Makoto becomes convinced that she has fallen in love with her savior and, following a disapproving lecture by her sister Yuki (Yoshiko Kuga), impulsively decides to move in with the penniless student whose circumstances, unbeknownst to the naïve young woman, includes receiving continued financial support in exchange for sexual services from a wealthy, older woman and renting his room out to friends for their occasional afternoon trysts. Estranged from the watchful gaze of her concerned and protective – but enabling – family, Makoto soon discovers that liberation, too, has a cost as Kiyoshi, emboldened by the unexpected financial windfall resulting from the driver’s guilt-ridden attempt to buy off his transgression, decides to turn the fateful incident into a profitable scam by reenacting the scenario with other seemingly well-to-do businessmen (with Kiyoshi opportunely following behind on a borrowed motorcycle) as the lovers’ lead a life of desperate, thrill seeking abandon.
Deeply rooted in the dynamic sociopolitical climate of post-occupation Japanese society, Cruel Story of Youth is a stylistically bold, incisive, and provocative examination of hopelessness, victimization, apathy, exploitation, and cultural alienation. From the early image of an international newsreel footage illustrating the April 19, 1960 student uprising in Korea (a contemporary reference and specificity that is also suggested in the newsprint background of the jarring, red painted title sequence) that segues to a shot of the young lovers as literal bystanders at a protest march against the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, Nagisa Oshima draws, not only an implicit contrast between the idealism and impassioned activism of the student protestors and the nihilism and self-gratification of the aimless lovers, but also reflects on the ambivalent (and increasingly invasive) role of the U.S. in Japan’s road to post-occupation self-government. It is interesting to note that the committed (albeit perhaps naïve) ideology and sense of purpose embodied by the student activists is also hinted through the shared history of Makoto’s sensible and emotionally hardened sister Yuki and her former suitor Akimoto (Fumio Watanabe) – now a struggling (and equally disillusioned) physician who subsidizes his income by performing abortions – that serves as a representation of Oshima’s own generation.
Oshima further illustrates the film’s underlying theme of cultural rootlessness through recurring episodes of Makoto’s hitchhiking requests to be driven home (a seemingly elusive destination that invariably ends up in dark, dead-end alleys), the couple’s own absence of generational families (perhaps, from self-imposed exile), and the rotating series of couples who rent Kiyoshi’s room for their indiscreet liaisons that constantly flout the bounds of private home and public space. (Note the indelible image of an eerily tranquil and disconnected, almost surreal floating log “world” as a brash Kiyoshi violates Makoto, visually reflecting her profound isolation and emotional ambivalence towards Kiyoshi’s betrayal). In the end, it is through this collective sentiment of failed idealism, transience, and profound disconnection that Akimoto’s illicit, opportunistic, and reprehensible occupation can be seen, not only as a societal symptom of a lost generation’s aimlessness and moral bankruptcy (and lost innocence), but also as the metaphoric desire of a wounded national psyche to erase the unwanted legacy of a forced, and violative, union: to regain sovereign pride and self-determination after a protracted history of a seemingly benevolent – but ultimately embittering and culturally traumatic – imposed external will.
A sharpshooter kills two prisoners in a police van at night. The guard on the van is suspended for six months; he’s Tamon, an upright, modest man. He begins his own investigation into the murders. Who were the victims, who are their relatives and girlfriends, who else was on the van that night? As he doggedly investigates, others die, coincidences occur, and several leads take him to the Hamaju Agency, which may be supplying call girls. Its owner is in jail, his daughter, the enigmatic Yuko, keeps turning up where Tamon goes. Tamon believes he can awaken good in people, but has he met his match? Will he solve the murders or be the next victim? And who is Akiba?
Quote: Veteran Japanese filmmaker Kaneto Shindo was 82 when he directed this meditation on life, death, and loss. Following the passing of her husband, elderly former actress Yoko Morimoto (Haruko Sugimura) travels to her summer home in the mountains of Central Japan. Upon her arrival, her servant Tokoyo (Nobuko Otowa) has sad news for her — her long-time gardener has recently committed suicide. Adding to Yoko’s sorrow is the arrival of Tomie, an old friend from her days in the theater, who is traveling with her husband Tohachiro Urshikuni (Hideo Kanze), also an actor. Tomie has grown senile, and Tohachiro no longer has the money to support them; he informs Yoko that they’ve chosen to kill themselves rather than entering an old age home that they can’t afford anyway, and they are taking this final trip to say goodbye to their friends. As Yoko deals with this troubling news, Tokoyo has a confession to make — she had an affair with Yoko’s late husband, who was the biological father of Tokoyo’s daughter. A Last Note received the Critics Award at the 1995 Moscow International Film Festival.
A clinically presented series of stark white, unembellished placards illustrates the sobering statistical data for the overwhelming public sentiment against the abolition of the death penalty as an off-screen narrator (Nagisa Oshima) provides a snide, but impassioned rebuttal to popular opinion by presenting a objective documentary of the austere and impersonal milieu associated with the methodical process of carrying out a state execution through the specific example of the appointed hanging of a convicted rapist and murderer known only as ‘R’ (Do-yun Yu): an empty, minimalist sitting room that provides an illusive, parting glimpse of a semblance of home for the condemned prisoner as he makes his way into the execution room, an assembly of unnamed official guests waiting in a segregated viewing room to witness the macabre ceremony, a procedural rehearsal of the chamber’s fail-safe sequence as the prisoner is blindfold and fitted with a noose, the actuation of trap door, the median measured time of 18 minutes before the heart completely stops and a staff physician (Rokko Toura) is able to record the official time of death. However, the seemingly predictable execution script fails to correlate as expected, as the doctor continues to detect R’s breathing for several minutes beyond the expected point of expiration. The unexpected development shifts the film’s tone from observant polemic to wry, dark comedy as the guards – eager to disavow any culpability that may have led to the malfunction – are thrown into helpless confusion on how to proceed with the seemingly half-dead hanged man in order to complete their assigned task. Imploring the doctor to promptly resuscitate R as an ironic humane gesture so that he can regain consciousness before being put to death again (and therefore, have an awareness of his guilt), the guards soon realize that the trauma of the failed execution has resulted in the prisoner’s amnesia. Acting on the advice of the education officer (Fumio Watanabe), the officials begin to re-enact episodes from the trial transcripts before an impassive and oblivious R in order to trigger his memory, revealing a more insidious and pervasive cultural malaise that cannot be set right by the empty gestures of inequitable justice.
Inspired by the notorious, real-life execution of a convicted murderer named Ri Chin’u who had killed two Japanese schoolgirls in 1958 (and subsequently courted publicity for his crimes through the newspapers and the police), Death by Hanging is an ingeniously conceived, subversive, provocative, and elegantly modulated tragicomedy on intolerance, assimilation, and capital punishment. Using recurring imagery of circles – in particular, the hangman’s noose, the Japanese flag (a motif similarly used in Oshima’s earlier film, The Sun’s Burial), and the upended, spinning bicycle wheel – that is further reflected in the film’s circular narrative structure, Nagisa Oshima illustrates the overarching public complicity that has perpetuated the cycle of dehumanization, racism, and violence and continues to provide the ideological bulwark for the nation’s codified, postwar social policies that foster mono-ethnicity and conformity at the expense of inclusion and diversity. Through repeated episodes of role-playing and transference, Nagisa Oshima further creates an analogy for the collective subconscious that exposes the underlying hypocrisy of its entrenched (and obsolete) ideology: the physician’s suppressed history of committed wartime atrocities (that broadly reflects the nation’s prewar militarism, isolationism, and imperialism); the vulgar stereotypes of ethnic Koreans employed by the guards in an attempt to re-instill R’s ethnic identity (note the use of a non-diegetic German language soundtrack as R is brought to the beach that further reinforces the historical legacy of racial intolerance); the awkward (and absurdly comical) re-enactments of the victims’ abduction and violation that reveal the participants’ own sexual neuroses and ambiguity over shifting traditional gender roles in modern society. In the end, the provocative and intrinsically incendiary issue of death penalty merely provides an integrally self-enclosed structural framework (and microcosm) for the film’s more contemporarily relevant examination of marginalization, guilt, and social justice – a reluctant, but necessary expurgation rooted in the collective conscience of an unreconciled cultural identity. (Strictly Film School)
Quote: Watashi-wa beretto is a promotional film for the automobile manufacturer Isuzu Jidosha directed by Nagisa Ôshima. Yasujirô Ozu assisted as executive creative consultant.
IMDB: A classic melodramatic love tragedy addressing social inequality in feudal Japan, depicted in Kenji Mizoguchi’s typical style. The nostalgic scenes of 1920s Tokyo provides a valuable visual experience set against the background of the title song, “Tokyo March.”
Quote: A college student receives a surprising offer to be a movie star in this unlikely Kinoshita film, sort of college film by the veteran director including even semi nude scene, but eventually the same themes of dreams versus reality and alienation come to the surface. Still, it’s one of his lighthearted films.
Aspiring to be admitted to a good university and to become a lawyer, Tasiro Yuusuke, a tenth-grader from Kyushu, enrols in a prestigious high school in Tokyo. Plans are made for him to live in his uncle’s house, part of which is rented out while his uncle is abroad on business. A realtor’s mistakes leaves Tasiro sharing the house with Kei Yamaba, the most beautiful girl in the school, who is also his classmate. There is the risk that their unexpected ‘co-habitation’ will be discovered by the school authorities. While he grows increasingly attracted to her, he is often irritated by her innocent and nonchalant attitude towards their predicament. They each develop other romantic attachments, but end up turning to each other.
After killing a man that raped one of his students, teacher Wakizaka finds himself embroiled in a plot being blackmailed into looking after a huge amount of cash. With tensions mounting and anxiety setting in, Wakizaka decides to spend the money, knowing the consequences of his actions will be of the most dire kind.
