By Bryan Hartzheim
If you read my columns from Japan, you probably come away with an overly negative impression of the current slate of this land's offerings. I have a reasonable explanation for this: I don't see many films, maybe two a month at most. This is primarily due to the exorbitant ticket prices, $18 for a matinee, which make it impossible to attend weekly unless you start selling organs.
The eternal truth of art also still applies: the great majority of movies are bad or worse, a few get placed on a scale of varying degrees of passability, and very rarely do they get better than that. So despite this throat-clearing, Japan's 2006 was the cinematic equivalent of America's 2005: I didn't see many extremely important or objectively instrumental works that will likely stand the test of even a few months. Many of the big independent figures like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Miike, Katsuhito Ishii, and Naomi Kawase lent their newest exclusively to the limited audiences of film festivals, and luminaries like Masato Harada, Shunji Iwai, and Hayao Miyazaki have nothing even in the works (though Miyazaki directed a series of terrific short films which were available only to those who visited his Ghibli Museum in Tokyo).
Several sentimental, feel-good, big-budget blockbusters were most popular with audiences. Hula Girls, Otoko tachi no Yamato, The Uchoten Hotel -- these films have also been confused as aesthetic successes, as evidenced by their recent nominations as Best Pictures in the Japan Academy Awards. Inexplicably, one of the better films of the year, Memories of Matsuko, nominated in the Best Direction, Screenplay, and Acting categories, was ignored. How does a film rank as one of the best directed, written, and acted of the year not summarily qualify? Go figure, Japan is learning a lot from Hollywood.
In any case, there were still enough fine features to keep one going to the cinema. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Yoji Yamada, Satoshi Kon, Kon Ishikawa, Koki Mitani, and Sabu all had new films, though they nearly all seemed to lend their talents to reinventions of older themes or works. Indeed, many of the best films this year were as varied in their presentation as their medium: jidaigeki, or “period drama;” theatrical farce; surreal anime; remake and homage; coming-of-age road movie; existential travelogue.
Ashita no Kioku (Memories of Tomorrow) treads that well-worn territory of Japanese and Korean melodramas: the incurable illness. In this case, Ken Watanabe's advertising executive has been stricken with Alzheimer's. The film certainly has its buckets of tears and the sentiment is often so thick the characters appear to be wading in emotional quicksand. What keeps it from getting sucked into the sugary sweetness of stale genre conventions, however, is the film's somewhat freshly realistic worldview. The script, adapted from Hiroshi Ogiwara's novel, implies that in the end, we are left with ourselves, our own states of mind, but without that, no amount of friends, loved ones, or “positive thinking” will stop the wheels of fate from grinding on. This idea is only completed by Watanabe. The actor has received accolades for his finely felt performance as a Japanese general in Eastwood's war saga, but here is his finest work, a performance that transcends the material to give it an unsentimental thrust. Ken cries, sure, but his character is wholly unlikable, a possessive, fiery executive who is not given a death sentence, but something in many ways worse: the knowledge that his world will disappear, and it does so with a rapidity and relentlessness that is frightening. Watanabe alternates between rage and tears in powerful swings, but it's his frustration, his childlike confusion and inability to articulate his still teeming brain that hits close to home. I can't possibly begin to comprehend what the feeling of this disease may be like, but Watanabe's performance, when I recall the habits my grandmother went through with a similar disease, is very much true to life.
It seems mental diseases were the course du jour in dramas this year from Korea and Japan. The only film I saw at the Tokyo Film Fest this year, The Bicycle Thief is Bad (Nihon no Jitensha Dorobo), is about a man with some kind of unexplained illness, but it's a very different kind of film. Director Tadakazu Takahashi's first feature is a muffled cry of existential anxiety. The plot is about as bare-bones as you can get: our protagonist, played with a primordial fury by Tetta Sugimoto, skips out on his work and wife and heads from his wintry northern home towards the lights of Tokyo. His means of travel comes from stealing bicycles. Forrest Gump pedaling, if you will. Wholly ungrateful for any patronage from strangers, open to fits of Turret's-like outbursts, and opposed to automatic transportation, our anti-hero – a coward incapable of wit, expression, or empathy – openly rails against the modern world, even flinging his cell phone over a snowy gorge. The style of the film is brooding and voyeuristic; the camera follows our bicycle thief through violent snowstorms, small farms, lonely karaoke bars, the streets of central Tokyo in a bitter, punching cold (the director and actor both told the audience that they nearly had to cancel the shoot because the weather was so hazardous). It's nearly all in total silence, as well, which is welcome considering we are allowed to ponder the breathtaking photography. As can be expected, the destination is somewhat of a letdown, but the ride there is exhilarating. Unfortunately, the film has still not gained distribution, but it deserves at the very least to be a DVD cult classic of independent minimalist filmmaking.
Kon Ichikawa also made a triumphant return, closing the festival with a remake of his 1976 classic, The Clan of the Inugamis (Inugamike no Ichizoku). This newest is a disappointment in several ways, most unfortunately in Ichikawa's decision to recreate every single scene of the new movie. Why bother, one wonders, when the original was nearly perfect? Well, for marketing reasons, obviously. Toei is celebrating the 30th anniversary of this beloved mystery, and Kon was hired to do the dirty work. The new film obviously loses freshness and vitality; the principals have aged, their innocence less believable, and the new cast provides no spontaneity – they're simply going through the motions and their interpretations are cagey. Ironically though, the film also loses its sense of absurd humor, keeping things reverent and serious when the old film was often a stylish and cheesy romp. The remake is cheesy, but in a deliberate and irony-laden way. But the story, one of the finest, character-driven murder mysteries ever composed, doesn't age. Its tale of a family of greedy heirs who are slowly offed one by one is intriguing. The characters are all repulsive in varying degrees; for instance, the bemused and brilliant detective has severe dandruff. Its world-weary tone is set beautifully against the misty, isolated backdrop of the lakeside-town Nasu. It has an atmosphere that is cinematic but unfolds theatrically, a wonderful marriage of filming styles. And the 1976 ending is one of the best cinematic epilogues, ranking right alongside Carol Reed's The Third Man as the most marvelous of finishing strokes.
It was a year of the aged giants in some ways, too. Yoji Yamada of Tora-san fame completed his samurai trilogy with Love and Honor (Bushi no Ichibun). One can suppose that this is simply more of the same. Yamada again, as with his Twilight Samurai, doesn't bother with the moral complexities. He solves them all for you, and doesn't bother questioning his characters' or his societies' worldviews. It's simplistic storytelling, but Yamada's reinvention of the old samurai myths absorbed me from the beginning. His ordinary samurai are placed in the most extraordinary of circumstances, and yet they must still follow a higher code of beauty, manners, and nobility that is at times without reward, very much to their disadvantage. Yamada is a sort of Eastwood of Japan, confident enough to visit new material, yet still concerned with men who feel obligated to follow important ideals of truth and honor and don't making a big, self-absorbed, grandstanding fuss about it. This is the stuff of exciting drama, but it's the particulars that are most captivating. The mundane jobs (here, food-tasters for the lord), the earthy clothing, the simple yet fulfilling domestic lives are contrasted with the beauty of the changing seasons. Flickering leaves fall like raindrops throughout and add a rich layer to the background. It's here in many ways that Yamada displays, like an old-Hollywood director, how he cut his teeth directing dozens and dozens of features over several years. And hey, SMAP pop star Takuya Kimura may just prove to be the next “Marky” Mark Wahlberg the way he fuses believable angst with cinematic vitality.
A different Kon, animation legend Satoshi Kon, released his fourth feature film, Paprika, which actually is based on a manga that Kon nearly started working on after his striking Hitchkock homage, Perfect Blue. This newest well might be the movie of the year. Kon's film is a sci-fi thriller told entirely through surrealistic imperatives. The film begins with the theft of a device that, once attached to a person's head, can record and play the person's dreams on a computer. The story is itself merely a device, however, for Kon to indulge in his more abstract and absurd machinations. A true auteur, Kon is one of the few directors who still insists on hiring professional voice actors, and not household name celebrities, to voice his characters. Hence the reunion here of the Cowboy Bebop cast. He also might be the only artist, other than Hou Hsiao-hsien, to approximate art with house and techno music. Paprika is his most bizarre film yet, a freakish and absurd parade of dreams and nightmares. Narrative isn't completely done away with until the very end, but even until then the film resembles the later stages of Fellini, with its revealing of carnal human desires, armies of frightening clowns, and endless imagery of grotesqueries. The idea that we're all made up of the same base impulses is the stuff of Buñuel. In our dreams, we can release them without inhibition of course, but the line between us and the animals even in reality is still very thin. For all the references in this little review, Kon invites them with his supreme reverence for film history (see further evidence: his tribute Millenium Actress). His film is also in a sense a reverie for the movies, the images that seem to be getting lost as we all pursue our various desires in an age of increasingly competing entertainments. When one of his characters dons the trademark hat and sunglasses of Akira Kurosawa, there is more than just irony at play. We can continue to make cinema and take them seriously, or we can all just, in the words of the titular heroine, “sit at our computers and masturbate till we die” (yes, I know I write this from a computer). The communal image might be a dying art, but Kon argues for its survival, and then leads by example. He might leave some a little cold, but more than Miyazaki, Kon is Japan's leading vision in animation for a future that is always trying to forget the lessons of its past.
And an honorable effort: after re-watching Memories of Matsuko on DVD, I still haven't warmed to the film's flaming flaws, but I have to its considerable virtues. Director Nakashima's flashy hand resembles a long-winded music video, and the film's arc, with its loads and loads of incident, much like Sabu's Shisso earlier this year, can best be described as “hysterical realism,” literary critic James Wood's term for contemporary fiction. But more than any film I've seen this year, the film feels kinetic. Nakashima gives this downward-spiraling melodrama a colorful zap, and he gets a hell of a performance out of Miki Nakatani, who's worth watching the film for alone. She connects everything from beginning to end and makes you marvel at how a collection of clichés become remarkably alive. Outside of Meryl Streep's witty and terrifying fashion boss, I haven't seen a more enthralling performance by an actress this year.
The Japan Academy did one thing right, and that was finally honor its creative animation industry with a Best Animation category in this year's awards. Despite the general slant of cartoons across the world as a children's art form, anime and especially comics don't have the cultural stigma to be taken as serious art like it does in the States; while Beauty and the Beast might be the only Best Picture nominee in the history of the Oscars, Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away both took the top prize.
Despite the new category, this is a year where anime is very little deserving of accolades. I speak of the numerous failed adaptations of manga, from sequels to Nana and Death Note, to Miyuki Miyabe's Brave Story. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the newest Ghibli, Gedo Senki (Tales from the Earthsea), directed not by Hayao, but son Goro Miyazaki. The story was everything Ghibli usually isn't: trite, unimaginative, uninteresting. It is unfair to compare father and son, as the narrative powers of Father Miyazaki are unequaled in animation since Disney, but Gedo Senki seemed sadly little more than a glorified weekday night TV serial.
I must lastly mention a spectacular failure, though, in Tekkon-Kinkreet. The animated film, focusing on two wuxia-like, packrat youths in a crumbling Japanese-fantasy cityscape, has awful characters that alternate between extremes of cuteness and petulance. The story, adapted from a Taiyo Matsumoto manga, is so incomprehensible that it borders absurdity, and the script and direction too often just don't know how to keep quiet, filling every possible frame with noise and inconsequential chatter. And yet director Michael Arias has imagined a world unlike anything I've ever seen. A blend of Showa-era Japanese architecture, dashes of East Asian mythology, and a medley of pop and cinema culture icons, the Takaramachi city is an extraordinary thing to witness, a slum that is in turns beautiful and ugly. Its characters don't simply inhabit it; they are a part of it, they bound off of and into it. This city literally seems to breathe with life in the way every building bends, every pipe shoots hot steam, every wall breaks to reveal new caverns and alleys both dun and sparkling. What is most amazing is how all of these separate places feel connected, that they manage to form a complete and existing world. Anime needs more creative talent like Arias, who is the first foreigner to direct a Japanese anime feature film, and he has clearly realized a vision quite apart from the sad clichés of the medium. His Takaramachi is the most organic screen dystopia since Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
What APA's other writers thought about the year in Asian cinema
Back to APA's "Best of 2006" issue