Month: January 2014

By Joe Bendel. 2013 sadly marked the passing of two pivotal luminaries of Japanese cinema. Nagisa Oshima was a true maverick auteur, whose films’ frank sexual and political content influenced generations of subsequent filmmakers. Donald Richie was a film historian and critic, as well as an experimental filmmaker in his own right, whose scholarship largely introduced the western world to Japanese cinema. They are exactly the sort of accomplished figures likely to be overlooked by the Oscar broadcast’s perennially controversial in memoriam tribute, in favor of actors from teeny-bopper TV shows with a handful of low budget horror flicks in their filmography. At least Film Forum shows better judgment and memory with their week-long engagement of Boy, which was championed by Richie as “Oshima’s finest film,” beginning yesterday (Friday 1/17).

Ten year old Toshio Omura has a school uniform, but he never attends classes. Instead, he travels throughout Japan with his grifter father Takeo and his short-sighted (in both senses) step-mother, Takeko Taniguchi, scamming motorists with fake accidents. It is always him or Taniguchi taking the flops and never the elder Omura. He just shows up later to shakedown a financial settlement. Of course, throwing one’s body in the vicinity of moving vehicles is bound to cause some bruising over time. However, the damage done to Omura’s innocence is irreparable. At times, he rebels, but he ultimately stays for the sake of his little brother, Peewee.

Oshima vividly captures just how sad and profoundly unfair it is when kids are not allowed to be kids. Without question, Master Omura is far more mature than his step-mother, with whom he has an enormously complex relationship. Shot on the streets, run-and-gun style, Oshima shows the audience Japanese society from his young protagonist’s perspective and it is hardly pretty. Nobody wants to get involved, which is why a parasite like his father stays in business so long.

In the annals of child performances, Tetsuo Abe’s work as Omura should rank in the uppermost echelon. It is an exceptionally disciplined turn, packing a visceral emotional punch. As an added bonus, he displays uncommon screen chemistry with pitch perfect one year old Tsuyoshi Kinoshita as Peewee. They have scenes together that will rip your guts out. Likewise, as Taniguchi, Akiko Koyama (Oshima’s off-screen wife and his frequent co-star in films like the classic Empire of Passion and the under-revived Ceremony) is agonizingly vulnerable and absolutely maddening in equal measure.

In contrast, Fumio Watanabe is largely lost in the shuffle as the pedestrian lout of a father, but this is unquestionably the boy’s film, not his father’s. Frankly, it is rather remarkable Koyama and little Kinoshita register so strongly.

Despite Oshima’s auteurish flourishes, periodically shifting from vivid color to black-and-white or gold tinted stock, the inspired-by-a-true-story Boy always feels uncomfortably real. It is a bracing film, yet it is also deeply humanistic. Cinematographers Seizô Sengen and Yasuhiro Yoshioka frame some striking images and their use of color is often dramatic, but they never overwhelm the film’s vibe of lonely melancholy. Justifiably hailed by the late Richie, Boy is a powerful masterwork, recommended for all serious film lovers as it opens in New York at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on January 18th, 2014 at 2:52pm.

By Joe Bendel. This will be one of the most wrenching O. Henry-esque stories most viewers could ever hope to see. When an over-achieving father learns his six year old son was switched at birth, he assumes biology trumps their parental bond. However, exchanging children proves to be far more complicated than he expects in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son, which opened this Friday in New York.

The driven Ryota Nonomiya has always excelled at everything, except maybe parenting. He always assumed his gentle son Keita simply took after his passive wife, Midori. However, when their maternity hospital announces the mistake (deliberately caused by a mentally disturbed nurse), everything suddenly makes sense to him. Initially, he agrees to meet the Saikis, a big, sloppily affectionate working class family, along with his biological son, Ryusei, ostensibly adopting a wait-and-see attitude. Yet, his wife can tell he has already made up his mind and is constitutionally incapable of protesting.

You might think Ryota Nonomiya and his severe father are vampires, considering their preoccupation with mere blood. Of course, emotional bonds are not so easily severed. To make matters worse, he starts to wonder if the Saikis got the better end of the deal. Frankly, many parents will find it absolutely flummoxing the Nonomiyas could ever let go of a sweet-tempered moppet like Keita, but Kore-eda’s screenplay is examining and to an extent critiquing attitudes rooted in a very specific cultural context (forthcoming DreamWorks remake notwithstanding). Without question, he advocates greater emphasis on nurture over nature, in just about every sense.

As his near namesake, young Keita Ninomiya is a major reason why Like Father is so massively poignant. He is ridiculously cute, but also devastatingly effective in his big dramatic scenes. Likewise, despite Midori’s submissive nature (which might set some western viewers’ teeth on edge), Machiko Ono’s arrestingly sensitive performance is deeply affecting. In contrast, Masaharu Fukuyama is rigorously disciplined as the coolly detached Nonomiya, earning his payoff the hard way. To their credit (and that of Kore-eda), the Saikis are also given real heft and dimension by Lily Franky and Yoko Maki, rather than serving as anti-Nonomiya strawmen.

Again, Kore-eda demonstrates a distinctly wise and forgiving sensibility for family drama as well as an unusual facility for directing children. It might be a cliché, but it is hard not to dub him the natural heir to Ozu based on Like Father and his previous films, like I Wish and Still Walking. A mature work from a contemporary master, Like Father, Like Son is highly recommended for general audiences as it opens in New York at the IFC Center.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on January 18th, 2014 at 1:25pm.

By Joe Bendel. There are not a lot of fact-checkers working in the documentary film industry.  Yet, many people assume anything they saw in a movie billing itself as a doc must be true.  Although it had its initial Japanese release in 1967, Shohei Imamura’s docu-deconstruction A Man Vanishes delivers a timely challenge to such blind faith.  Yet, it is still gritty and noir enough to easily fit within the Asia Society’s mini-retrospective, Vengeance is Shohei Imamura when it screens (for free) today.

As a salaryman with a steady job and a fiancée, Tadashi Oshima initially seems like an aptly unremarkable representative of the reported 91,000 Japanese citizens who vanished without a trace two years prior.  However, as Imamura’s on-camera investigator and Oshima’s intended, Yoshie Hayakawa, his pursue the trail, a very different picture emerges.

Oshima had been caught embezzling company funds and was also carrying on with other women, including perhaps Hayakawa’s sister Sayo, who denies the accusation vociferously.  In fact, the film ostensibly hinges on the question of who is telling the truth: Sayo Hayakawa or the witnesses placing her with Oshima.  It all so disillusions Yoshie Hayakawa, she develops a romantic attachment for the actor playing Imamura’s investigator.

Several times during the course of the third act, Imamura directly states that this film is fictional.  He even literally tears down the backdrops he has assembled midway through the climatic confrontation.  Yet audiences are so programmed to accept the documentary form as fact, we still believe when the actors take their “he said-she said” show out into the streets. It is like we can’t stop being had by Imamura.

In many ways, the dramatized docu-hybrid elements of Vanishes seem decades ahead of their time, especially the trippy sequences involving the shaman advising Hayakawa, whose rituals would not be out of place in a straight up genre picture.  On the other hand, the deliberately desynchronized soundtrack harkens back to the Nouvelle Vague’s trick bag.  By the same token, Kenji Ishigura’s black-and-white cinematography faithfully preserves a street level time capsule of Tokyo in the mid 1960’s.

At one point, one of the witnesses contradicting Sayo Hayakawa protests: “I have no reason to lie.”  Essentially, Imamura’s entire film serves as a rejoinder saying: “yes, but you have no reason to tell the truth either.”  Evidently, Vanishes started out legit, but circumstances forced Imamura’s meta-hybrid hand.  Still, the implications regarding the limits of objective filmmaking remain the same.  Imamura would in fact make several more conventional documentaries, but the less politically charged Vanishes, with its woman (or women) scorned, is more thematically compatible with his hardboiled morality plays.  An enigmatic puzzle every cineaste should enjoy chewing on, A Man Vanishes screens free of charge this Saturday (1/18) at the Asia Society, as part of their new Vengeance is Shohei Imamura film series.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on January 18th, 2014 at 1:20pm.