Godzilla Minus One [2023]

 If collective national trauma emanating from Japan’s dark martial past, especially pertaining to WW2 and its aftermaths, informed Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, these were in the foreground of Godzilla Minus One, the smashing new entrant in this long-running kaiju franchise featuring one of Japan’s biggest pop-culture icons. The narrative begins towards the end of the war when, facing certain defeat, Japan notoriously deployed kamikaze pilots for suicide attacks. Upon letting pragmatism and survival instincts trump over the dated concepts of honour and valour – inevitably construed as shameful cowardice by his countrymen – Kōichi (Kamiki Ryûnosuke) feigns technical snags to make an unannounced landing at a small island, where we have our first sighting of the angry reptilian monster. Plagued by immense survivor’s guilt upon his return to a ravaged Tokyo after the war, he tries settling down with his found-family comprising of a woman who’s lost her family (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned kid, but eventually joins a ragtag crew of fellow vets tasked with diffusing naval mines which are dark remnants of the war. Meanwhile, relentless nuclear tests by the US at Bikini Atoll have brought about deadly mutations to Godzilla, making it not just infinitely more massive and ferocious, with an ability to produce devastating heat rays, but nearly indestructible too. Consequently, when it starts causing massive damages upon reaching the Japanese shores, former weapons engineer (Hidetaka Yoshioka) devises an ingenious, if enormously convoluted plan, to defeat this primordial beast. Buoyed by spectacular visual effects, the director delivered a commendable mix of scintillating sequences, deliberately melodramatic human story, and a dismal historical setting reminiscent of Japanese New Wave films that added vital meanings to the proceedings.

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

Genre: Sci-Fi/Action/Adventure/Family Drama/Creature Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

The Boy and the Heron [2023]

 What immediately arrests one about The Boy and the Heron – the first film in a decade by legendary octogenarian Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, who came out of his retirement to make this, and the 25^th feature production by Studio Ghibli – are its dazzling, painstakingly handcrafted and decidedly anachronistic 2D artwork. Miyazaki was heavily inspired by the 1937 Japanese novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino (the film’s original title is, in fact, a direct nod to the book); he also self-consciously looked back at his own childhood days and filmography while conceiving this story, which made it semi-autobiographical and self-reflexive. It begun against the harrowing backdrop of WW2 as young Hisako loses his mother to a tragic fire accident. As the war rages on, he finds himself displaced to tranquil rural environs when his father, an ecstatic manufacturer of fighter planes for the military, marries his sister-in-law and relocates to her large estate. There, haunted by his memories and engulfed in debilitating grief, Hisako finds himself lost amidst his new mom and a group of eccentric old ladies, and becomes even more withdrawn upon facing bullying at the local school. That’s when he encounters a speaking, anthropomorphic Heron who mocks him out of his stupor and provokes him into a parallel world – filled with blazing phantasmagoria and outlandish creatures – where he must overcome fantastical obstacles to save his old and new moms. Wildly imaginative and heavily metaphorical – especially around its underlying evocations of past, present and future – the film took an uninhibited turn after having begun on a low-key note, which made it seem messy and overdone on occasions, its affecting mix of loss, melancholy and hope notwithstanding.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Genre: Animation/Fantasy/Adventure/Coming of Age

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Perfect Days [2023]

 Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – described by the amusing witticism “Zen and the art of public toilet maintenance” – is a film that both enthralled me and filled me with uneasiness. It’s stunningly crafted, with gorgeous audiovisual designs, understated poetic reflections, gently impressionistic style, simmering emotions that vacillated between wonderment and melancholy, embracing of the mundane, and absorbing remembrance of a time when the world was still analogue. The cyclic routine of Hirayama – a cleaner of fancy toilets in an upscale Tokyo district – is brought to life by Kōji Yakusho’s immersive and near-unspoken turn; he loves his morning coffee, has a prized collection of classic rock and pop audio cassettes that he listens to while driving, takes photos of trees with his old film camera during work breaks, has the same dinner every night, visits his favourite bookstore and bar during the weekends (the latter often ends with impromptu gigs), and lives at a small and minimalist home where he tends to his little garden and voraciously reads esoteric books. Its irresistible splendour, however, stood at unsettling odds with its rather problematic romanticization of a blue-collar man who’s employed in a menial job which surely involves unsavoury tasks, long working hours, miniscule salary, lack of employment benefits, and being compelled to live a dreary existence that’s antithetical to pursuing transcendental and eclectic aesthetic standards. The job of a public toilet cleaner anywhere is anything but cute, which made the film’s idealized gaze patronizing and discomfiting. Its maudlin tone and nostalgic indulgences made it tad kitschy too. This dichotomous viewing experience, therefore, made it a paradoxical work could’ve done with imbuing the “perfect” in the title with edgier and more ironic undercurrents.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)

Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Existential Drama

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan/Germany

Evil Does Not Exist [2023]

 Contrary to what its ominously ironic title supposedly suggests, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi asserted otherwise – viz. evil’s malleable forms and arbitrary manifestations – in his moody, shape-shifting and beguiling film Evil Does Not Exist. The evocation of its disquieting atmosphere was established in the overture itself, which comprised of a languorous tracking shot observing a dense canopy of trees, accompanied by Eiko Ishibashi’s rapturous composition, with whom Hamaguchi had previously collaborated in the brilliant Drive My Car. The scene suddenly cuts and the non-diagetic score is abruptly replaced with eerie silence; this unsettling aesthetic shift recurred over the course of the deliberately paced narrative that ambiguously ended in media res, thus amplifying the impact of its shocking finale, while reinstating the densely moulded commentaries of this brooding morality tale and smouldering eco-political thriller. Set in a tranquil hamlet, its delicate ecological balance and the residents’ harmonious co-existence with nature come under direct threat when a rapacious Tokyo organization – sardonically embodying late-stage capitalism multiplied few times over – purchases land there for setting up “glamping”, i.e. a farcical playground for wealthy city dwellers, which is bound to pollute the nearby stream’s pristine water, increase chances of forest fires, and put local lifestyles at dire risk. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a taciturn man who does various odd jobs for villagers and has a profound intimacy with his stunningly photographed surroundings which he’s inculcated into his little daughter, embodies – unbeknownst to the company’s two representatives – the outward placidity and underlying ferocity of the natural world. In a fine display of nuance, these two reps, who elicit strong negative perceptions during a meeting with the residents who display stirring community solidarity, are themselves exasperated by their devious profession.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Mystery

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Monster [2023]

 Monster – Kore-eda’s first film in Japan since his feral found-family masterpiece Shoplifters, having made The Truth in France and Broker in South Korea since then – is a sensitive and delicately-strung queer coming-of-age film. Though his first exploration of this topic, it felt connected to the rest of his canon as he’s made multiple films on social outsiders and tangled human relationships both centred around kids and featuring them in significant roles. He crafted this like a three-act play, wherein “Rashomon Effect” is resorted to in showing the same chain of incidents from three different perspectives. However, while the celebrated Kurosawa work demonstrated the fallacy of an objective truth and posited the co-existence of multiple variants of it, here the objective was decidedly simpler, viz. to clarify what actually happened through revelation of new information from each subsequent POV. While this intricate plotting device added an air of unfolding mystery to the proceedings, Kore-eda’s inclinations for sentimental flourishes (and contrivances) were detrimental to its cinematic integrity on occasions. The evolving bond between Minato, an emotionally confused fifth-grader, and Yori (played with heartbreaking liveliness by Hinata Hiiragi), a sweet if oddball kid who’s continually targeted for his non-heteronormative behavioural manifestations, is first shown through the eyes of Minato’s single-mother (Sakura Andō) who believes that his son is facing abuse at school. The contexts and meanings, unsurprisingly, dramatically change when we then witness what had transpired from the perspectives of school teacher Hori (Eita Nagayama) and Minato, thus delivering overarching commentaries on pat judgements, bullying, dysfunctional relationships, and conformity. Renowned musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose resplendent piano compositions added emotional resonance to many of the sequences, sadly passed away before the film released.

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

Genre: Drama/Buddy Film/Coming-of-Age

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy [2021]

 The 2021 award for making the two most diverse films in the same year arguably goes to Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. If his magnificent Drive My Car was an immersive and melancholic work on loss, grief and memories, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy was instead a thematically lighter and formally playful portmanteau film. In fact, its wry, gently ironic and low-key portrayals of chance encounters, transient relationships, seriocomic interactions, old grouses and the human condition were reminiscent of Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo. Interestingly, while “theatre” formed the central component in the former film, everyday role plays – to camouflage one’s past, evoke reactions and relive old memories – featured here, and this performative aspect provided for an interesting commonality between the two. It comprised of three short episodes stitched together along the above facets. “Magic (or Something Less Assuring)” began with a deceptively relaxed conversation between Meiko (Kotone Furukawa) and her best friend (Hyunri), wherein the latter shares her budding romance with a guy; as it turns out, he was Meiko’s ex, and despite her outwardly bubbly nature, she harbours a lashing spite towards him. In “Door Wide Open” – the best episode of the lot – a married woman (Katsuko Mori) in an affair with a college student is coaxed into entrapping a professor (Kiyohiko Shibukawa); though a surprising kinship develops between them after a saucy game of erotic one-upmanship where she recites an explicit section from his novel, an unfortunate goof-up plays spoilsport. Finally, in “Once Again”, two middle-aged women – an out-of-work IT coder (Fusako Urabe) and an unhappy housewife (Aoba Kawai) – strike a fleeting friendship upon thinking the other as someone they once knew, and decide to continue with that mistaken identity.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Genre: Drama/Comedy/Slice of Life/Omnibus Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

Drive My Car [2021]

 Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car – the second marvelous adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short stories in nearly as many years, after Lee Chang-dong’s ravishing and breathtaking Burning in 2018 – was a sumptuous, meditative and leisurely paced exploration of grief, memory, art, performance, deceit and being trapped to one’s past, through an immaculate restraint and understated melodrama. At its heart was an enigmatic and gradually unfolding friendship between two lost souls who couldn’t be further apart – in their socioeconomic backgrounds, dispositions and life’s choices – and yet bound by the complex, painful and unreconciled memories that they carry of someone they profoundly loved, on occasions hated, never fully understood, tragically lost and doomed to forever be haunted by. Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a renowned theatre director and veteran thespian who had an enigmatic marriage to the incredibly alluring and accomplished film screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima) – she would craft beguiling stories during coitus, made extensive cassette recordings to help Kafuku rehearse his lines while driving his cherished cherry-red Saab 900, and they loved each other deeply despite her chronic infidelity – and hence her unexpected death leaves him lonelier than ever. Two years later, upon accepting a theatre project that requires him to relocate to Hiroshima for a couple of months – in order to direct a multi-lingual adaptation of Chechov’s Uncle Vanya – he ends up forming a quietly fascinating bond with Misaki (Tōko Miura), a young, aloof and taciturn girl employed as his chauffeur, and they together embark on a liberating road trip. Gorgeously photographed, meticulously staged, suffused with repressed emotions and lingering melancholy, and filled with a few other intriguing characters too, this 3-hour film was at once expansive, immersive and intimate.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Road Movie

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan