KJ awards, Miyazaki

[Mark Schilling]

In response to Bill Thompson's request, here's my 1997 Best Ten article for
the Japan Times. Given the JT's penchant for hacking my annual Best Tens,
this version ought to be called the writer's cut. Yoroshiku.  

Best Ten film for 1997

By Mark Schilling

   This year has been the best for Japanese films, both commercially and
artistically, since I began reviewing them in this space in 1989. While
Hayao Miyazaki's "Mononoke Hime" (Princess Mononoke) set a new all-time box
office record for both foreign and domestic films and Yoshimitsu Morita's
"Shitsurakuen" (Lost Paradise) grossed more than any Japanese non-animated
film since "Ten to Chi to" (Heaven and Earth) in 1990, Shohei Imamura's
"Unagi," Naomi Kawase's "Moe no Suzaku," (Suzaku), Jun Ichikawa's "Tokyo
Yakyoku" (Tokyo Lullaby) and Takeshi Kitano's "Hana-Bi" carried away major
prizes at major festivals -- the largest one-year haul for Japanese films
in recent memory. 
     The doomsayers who have been predicting the industry's decline and
fall for decades would thus seem to have the worse of the argument. Not
necessarily so. A "Mononoke Hime" does not come along every year and the
industry's deep structural problems, including a lack of funding, training
and screens, are still very much with us. Also, for all the outstanding
successes of 1997, there were more disappointments and outright disasters.
Juzo Itami may have decided to kill himself because of a photo magazine
story about an alleged extramarital affair, but the box office failure of
his last film, "Marutai no Onna," pushed him nearer the brink. I wish I
could say that the Japanese audience was wrong, just as it was wrong about
his comic masterpiece, "Tampopo," but unfortunately it wasn't: the film was
tired and uninspired. The commercial formula that had made him a nationally
known brand name had become a corrosive mask he could never remove.. 
      Having acknowledged the industry's dark side, I should add that the
quantity and quality of the new talent emerging bode well for its future.
Also, that talent is finding a friendlier reception abroad, with a growing
number of invitations to foreign film festivals and sales to foreign film
buyers. The success of Masayuki Suo 's "Shall We Dance" in its US release
can only encourage this trend. The banner that Itami carried so valiantly
for more than a decade --as representative of contemporary Japanese cinema
to the world-- has been passed on to capable hands. 


 
1. "2/Duo"

 Documentarian Nobuhiro Suwa's first feature film, "2/Duo," decribes a
relationship gone wrong with an immediacy and realism that earned it the
NETPAC Award at the 1997 Rotterdam Film Festival. His lovers -- a
saleswoman in a fancy boutique and a struggling actor with no visible means
of support -- give little indication that they are any way out of the
ordinary. And yet in their very everydayness, they touch us in ways that
characters in the carefully crafted "trendy dramas," with their high
stylistic gloss, rarely do. We cannot help feeling that we are peering past
the genkan into their innermost secrets. None of this could have been easy
for Hidetoshi Nishijima and Eri Yu, who play the lovers, but together they
create the illusion of naturalness and, more importantly, rightness. 
     Suwa does not offer a happy ending or propose any easy answers.
Instead he has given us a deeply observed portrait of a couple -- and by
inference, a generation -- that seem to have it all, including an erring
sense for the right style and attitude, but find adulthood a terror and
intimacy hard, if not impossible, to achieve. 


2. "Tokyo Yakyoku" (Tokyo Lullaby) 

     In his tenth film, which won him the Best Director prize at the
Montreal Film Festival, Jun Ichikawa tells a story of middle-aged romance
more by stolen glances than fervent speeches, in a style characterized by
an economy of means and suffused with a piercingly austere beauty. Though
Ichikawa may be accused of overly prettifying his Tokyo  cityscapes  -- his
dawns are invariably rosy, without a trace of the usual brown haze -- he
rejects the pose of self-important auteurism. If anything, his approach is
closer to that of a self-effacing storyteller patiently waiting to capture
the fugitive moments that reveal, amidst the mundane flow of his
character?s lives, the drama of their innermost desires. Ichikawa may shape
his material with the exquisitely deliberate stylization of an Ozu, but he
never forces it. His films persuade because they breathe with a rhythm that
is quietly, naturally, exhilaratingly alive.     
 
3. "Unagi"
     After seven years of silence, Shohei Imamura came back brilliantly
yhis year with "Unagi," a film about a salaryman-turned-wife-murderer who
rediscovers the ability to trust and love. The winner of the Palm D'Or at
the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, "Unagi" at times descends to broad farce and
blatant sentimentality, but nonetheless recalls the emotional vibrancy,
sensual audacity and humanistic realism of Imamura's best work. Still the
cinematic anarchist, who rejects middle-class morality, Imamura
unflinchingly explores the unruly impulses of the loins and heart,
including the impulse to kill.

4. "Onibi" (Will-'O-the-Wisp) 

      Rokuro Mochizuki's film about an aging hitman's attempt to go
straight  has a narrative arc of a thousand other yakuza flicks, but it is
less a throwback to genre conventions than a quietly brilliant reworking of
them. While providing the expected tension and thrills --  the gunplay
scenes are as crisp, clean and <ital> real <ital> as any I've seen in
recent Japanese films -- "Onibi" is a subtle character study that succeeds
in making its hero more than the usual cool-dude icon. Playing the hitman,
Yoshio Harada gives his best performance in years. Known for portraying
macho life force types, at times with a swagger that verges on self-parody,
Harada creates in "Onibi,"a character who is credibly human in a weary,
end-of-the-tether way, but competent at his grisly trade, who sincerely
wants to start a new life, but doggedly exemplifies old-fashioned gangster
virtues.

5. "bounsu koGALS" (Leaving)

Though the topic of Masato Harada's  "bounsu koGALS" (Leaving) -- the high
school girls, or kogyals, who earn huge sums and run huge risks going on
"paid dates" (enjo kosai) with middle-aged men -- may have been the victim
of massive media overkill, the film is the most vibrant, sharply observed
portrait of Japanese youth I saw this year. Though its kogals may be hardly
typical of Japanese teenage girls  -- not every sweet young thing in a
plaid mini packs a stun gun, talks tough to yakuza gangsters or earns a
more in a night than her salaryman father does in a month -- they impress
as brilliantly realized archetypes, not ripped-from-the-headlines clich?s. 
Refusing to simplistically preach or coyly caricaturize, Harada.gets nearly
everything right, with the insight and precision of a documentarian who
knows his subjects inside and out.  
 
6. "Tokyo Biyori"
      Based on a "Yoko," book by photographer Nobuyoshi Araki about his
wife, who died of cancer in 1990, Naota Takenaka's "Tokyo Biyori" is a
portrait of a marriage filled with the small crises that may have the
undramatic randomness of life but reveal character, arouse empathy. 
      Though his principals may not qjuite resemble anyone we know -- it
would be hard to find another turbulent spirit like Yoko -- their feelings
for each other ring true. Also, though Takenaka's movie may go gooey in
places it mostly gets it right, including the intimate, revealing details
that outsiders to a relationship seldom see. By the end we understand why
the film's photographer remained so devoted to a woman who would try the
patience of saint and why Yoko always returned to him after her wanderings,
both mental and physical. 
      Takenaka also preserves the gentleness of spirit that makes his
earlier films such a pleasure to be in. His photographer is less a clone of
Araki than a continuation of other Takenaka characters who, whatever their
foibles, have a kindly, even worshipful, affection for the women in their
lives.


7. "Mononoke Hime"

     Japan's biggest box office hit ever, ?Mononoke Hime? (Princess
Mononoke) represents a departure for director Hayao Miyazaki; none of his
earlier Studio Ghibli hits were set in Japan's pre-modern era and none cost
as much to make. The film's Y2 billion budget, a record for a Japanese
animated film, was well spent: with far more fluidity and realism of
movement than the typical Japanimation, Miyazaki?s film offers a unique
brand of visual dazzlement, including fight scenes of an inventiveness and
vitality to equal the best of Jackie Chan. More than just sheer movement,
however, Miyazaki's masterpiece offers a vividly realized characters,
brilliantly imagined fantasy worlds and a compelling, if complex, story
about the rise of modernization and the destruction of nature .With his
lushly drawn landscapes and strange and fearsome forest gods, he recreates
the natural and mythopoetic world of old Japan with a characteristic
sympathy and passion. Miyazaki has again made, not a product for mass
consumption, but a work of highly individualized animation art. 

8. "Moe no Suzaku" (Suzaku)

      The winner of a Camera D'Or prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival,
Naomi Kawase's debut feature is beautifully photographed, carefully
crafted, deliberately paced film set in the mountains of Nara. While
Kawase's themes, including the disintegration of the family and the
abandonment of traditional lifestyles, are those of many Golden Age
masters, her methods are anything but orthodox. A documentarian who won
acclaim for her autobiographical 8 mm films, Kawase uses documentary
methods with a subtle boldness to impart a sense of lived reality. Her
film's non-actors do not attempt to consciously emote. They are, in fact,
taciturn almost to point of incomprehensibility. But their silence feels
natural, their actions have an expressiveness that comes from character,
not dramatic coaching.
      "Suzaku" offers no easy hope of salvation, only an elegy for what
once was and might have been. But in its honesty and artistry it gives us
confidence that, in Ms. Kawase's hands, the best traditions of Japanese
filmmaking still survive. 
   


9. "Radio no Jikan" (Welcome Back, Mr. Mcdonald)

      Koki Mitani's debut feature, "Radio no Jikan," is a rarity among
Japanese comedies: a farce with a clever premise, flawless structure,
crackling performances and laugh-out-loud gag lines. Based on a play
written by Mitani, the film is obviously, even blatantly, stagy. His
actors, however, are not trying, and failing, to play Just Folks, but
succeeding, hilariously, in impersonating people not too different from
themselves: i.e., show business types ostensibly putting on a radio drama
but, depending on their place in the pecking order, really engaged in
ego-tripping or ego-stroking. It's all quite theatrical, quite inventive
and, in its own knockabout way, quite convincing. But while being, in style
and manner, closer to Hollywood than even the comedies of Juzo Itami,
"Radio no Jikan" dissects the inner workings of Japanese social relations
with a finer, truer scalpel than almost any film in recent memory.


10. "Wild Life"

      In his fourth film since his  hyperviolent 1996 debut, "Helpless,"
Shinji Aoyama shows that he is a quick learner. In "Wild Life," as in
"Helpless," we have a tall, handsome, longhaired hero, lost in a sea of
anomie. And once again, the hero finds himself mixed up with the yakuza,
with predictably violent results. But Aoyama's treatment of this familiar
material is drier, funnier, stronger. 
       Despite its cartoonish moments, "Wild Life" is less a genre send up
than a carefully stylized exercise in genre stretching. But while
delivering the entertainment goods, including a few laughs, a few chills
and a few fresh takes on yakuza movie conventions, Aoyama goes beyond the
usual genre limits to explore broader themes, including the
unpredictability of life and the elusiveness of truth. ":Wild Life" is an
existential black comedy, with a thriller punch.    
 


----------
> From: Bill Thompson <SISWT at CUVMC.AIS.COLUMBIA.EDU>
> To: KineJapan <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
> Subject: KJ awards, Miyazaki
> Date: Thursday, February 05, 1998 1:09 AM
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks, Aaron and Mark, for the Japanese awards postings.
> Although most of us tend to discount such lists, I'm curious
> which Japanese films you and other Kine-Japan writers included in your
> top 10, and why.  Sometimes inclusions and omissions can be
> quite interesting.
> 
> 
> Joseph_C_SCHAUB at umail.umd.edu (js326) wrote:
> 
> >Thanks for posting the Kinejun Top 10, Aaron.  Actually I was a little
> >surprised to see MONONOKE HIME in the number 2 spot.  Is it unusual
foran
> >anime to receive that kind of critical praise?                        
ilm
> >
> >Joe
> 
> Actually, Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro finished #1 (!!) in the Kinema
> Jumpo poll in 1988, and several of his other films, including
> Warriors of the Wind (1984) and Laputa (1986), were also among
> the KJ top 10.
> 
> One can find KJ top 10 lists from 1926 - 1994 in English
> in Stuart Galbraith IV's  The Japanese Filmography 1900 through 1994
> (McFarland & Company, Inc.).  Since this reference book is quite
> expensive and hard to locate, I'd be willing to xerox and mail copies
> of the pages listing these winners (send email to me with a mailing
> address); I doubt that this information is online anywhere.
> 
> Perhaps someone could post KJ top 10's from 1995 (the Japanese
> title is fine for me) so those of us who use this source can update our
> records.  Thanks.
> 
> 
> Bill Thompson
> siswt at cuvmc.ais.columbia.edu