Berlin Int'l Film Festival, Report (LONG)

[Janine Hansen]

Hi,

here are some random thoughts and observations concerning the Japanese
films shown at the Berlin International Film Festival. I hope you're
interested and would be very glad about any comments.

Janine Hansen
Berlin Free University
___________________

48. Berlin International Film Festival, Feb. 11.-22., 1998


SADA
Obayashi's film about the Japanese femme fatale Abe Sada who killed and
castrated her lover in 1936 was announced as a "remake" of AI NO KORIDA
by Oshima Nagisa. Personally, I don't think it was a good choice to
enter this film into the competition. Maybe just a gamble on the story's
reputation? SADA was sure to get much media attention because Oshima's
film aroused a scandal at the 1976 festival when it was confiscated
after its first screening. The audience reacted with polite applause to
SADA though a number of people left the premiere during the screening.
What annoyed me was the out-dated but familiar way in which SADA
portrays female sexuality. Abe Sada is raped at the age of 14 (the first
thing we learn about her in the film) so she has to become a geisha and
eventually turns into an extremely sensual women who ends up as a
murderess. Her change is not exactly convincing but it is an old pattern
-- and very much of an old man's fantasy, too: A woman whose sexuality
is awakened by rape turns into a sex-monster. Obayashi begins his film
in an ironical way (he presents a narrator who later acts a part in Abe
Sada's life but begins by taking the spectator into a Taisho-time
Shochiku cinema) but this distance gets lost along the way. It seemed to
me that Obayashi's various artistic experiments in this film don?t go
together very well.

MONONOKE HIME
Obviously, there must be much more anime fans in Berlin than I ever
expected; PRINCESS MONONOKE was actually sold out -- even though it was
playing in one of the big halls, and in spite of TV and radio interviews
with journalists, specialists and whatever other folks who swore the
film would never appeal to a German audience. But it did. Some scenes
made me wonder if the spectators' reactions weren't supposed to be a
little different, I for example found it hard to decide whether the
monster-turned wild boar in the beginning is a revolting or a cute
sight. MONONOKE HIME was shown as a special screening out of
competition.


RAJIO NO JIKAN (WELCOME BACK, MR. MCDONALD)
Mitani Koki's comedy should have been in the competition rather than in
the Forum! But the Japanese film is not known for its humor here and the
Forum organizers themselves were a little surprised by RAJIO NO JIKAN's
apparent success. I heard people say they had never laughed so much in a
Forum film at all. Mitani joked he was surprised by the fact that the
Berlin audience laughed at exactly the same places as the Japanese.
Rumors are that he might have found a distributor for the German market
which is rare for a Japanese film anyway let alone a comedy.

UNLUCKY MONKEY
This grotesque story of an attempted bank robbery was received well,
too. Sabu's DANGAN RUNNER was shown here last year I think, and it seems
there are already some Sabu-fans around. The nervous-looking director
was there and greeted the audience to what he said was the first public
screening. Does anybody know if there is a special relationship between
Sabu and Kitano Takeshi? Maybe I got this impression just because I saw
HANA-BI shortly before the festival started but there are a number of
similarities like the bank robbery, the yakuza milieu, the actors
Terashima Susumu and Osugi Ren (as gangsters in UNLUCKY MONKEY), and the
whole being a man's world. Violence plays an important part in both
films, too, though its treatment is certainly different. Any comments?

JUNK FOOD
Yamamoto Masashi presents three episodes without much of a connection
but taking place in one city, Tokyo. The day (and the film) begins with
the morning of his blind mother, then moves on to the day of the drug
addicted OL Miyuki and finally follows several young people through
their violent night until a new morning begins at the blind lady's
apartment. Yamamoto has been a guest of the "International Forum of the
Young Film" several times, the first being 1983. So after 15 years he is
still considered a "young" filmmaker... I wonder if there is any age
limit to being young at all.

BLUE FISH
Ryoko works at a hairdresser's in a mall in Naha, Okinawa. Like her
friends she leads a simple if a little boring life. Kazuya, a mysterious
young man moves into the apartment opposite the beauty parlor. Ryoko
tries to attract his attention but he is reluctant to speak to her. She
doesn't know he is a drug dealer belonging to the Shanghai mafia who now
has to hide because the Taiwanese mafia has taken over the market again.
Director Nakagawa Yosuke says that he found a scent of life in Okinawa
that he had been missing in Tokyo. So he filmed his first film in Naha
because he wanted to depict this more Asian and international flair.
Luckily, he stresses the atmosphere more than the somewhat shallow
story. But looking at the characters I couldn't help but wonder what
kind of Asian flavor Nakagawa had in mind when he constructed his plot:
On the one hand we have Ryoko and her Okinawan friends who lead their
ordinary lifes in a beautiful surrounding. On the other side there are
the drug-dealing Shanghai and Taiwan mafia, an American GI buying drugs
and Kazuya, whose mother is Taiwanese. Okinawans are innocent and good,
the rest are criminals? Oh no, says Nakagawa, he wasn't suggesting
anything like that. My question must have upset him a little for he then
gave more evidence of his not being prejudiced against Asians: His
business partner was Chinese, he said, and as his next film he was
planning something on Chinese cooking. Still, it seems like a strange
coincidence to invent a story like this and not even notice the
implications.

PERFECT BLUE
Another anime, and a surprisingly thrilling one. Kirigoe Mima, a
successful aidoru is persuaded to become an actress. Not only does her
first role include a rape scene, she also poses nude for a weekly
magazine and thus loses the sweetness and "purity" of her idol days. The
heroine discovers an Internet page called "Mima's Room" that seems to be
written by her alter ego and soon reality, nightmares, the drama she
acts in, and virtual reality become blurred. In the end, everything is
put right back into its place but the intricately woven narrative
switches from one state of matter to another one until you're completely
confused (Someone in the audience asked the director Kon Satoshi if
there was one thread of the actual story going all the way through and
if he was able to tell at any given point which part was real and which
belonged to Mima's fantasy or not. He grinned and said yes, he was.) Kon
and his producer seemed very proud of the international acclaim PERFECT
BLUE had won already and were all the more looking forward to its
release in Japan. I'm not very fond of anime and don't know many, so
this might sound rather silly, but the topic stroke me as something that
could have been turned into a feature film rather than into an anime.
I'm not saying that the film isn't good as an anime but the story seems
to be much more appropriate for a "real" film. I realize this is
probably going to earn me the scorn of all those anime-buffs out there
and also of people like the director Kon who want to tread new paths in
the production of anime...

NAJA NO MURA
A beautiful documentary depicting life in an half-abandoned village near
Chernobyl. The director Motohashi Seiichi has worked as a photographer,
NAJA NO MURA is his first film. We get to know the daily life of the few
families who still live in Nadja's village but hardly ever hear them
talk about the political background, their suffering, radioactive
pollution and all the issues that one immediately associates with the
name of Chernobyl. A very impressive film, melancholy and positive at
the same time. A somewhat emotional argument developed from the audience
because some spectators more or less accused Motohashi of leaving out
the most important things (why didn't he make a more "political" film?)
while others debated that whoever thought the director's way of showing
life after the catastrophe wrong should make their own film. Motohashi
himself said he had of course been to the reactor site, hospitals, and
other places but did not include those pictures into his film.

Also in the Forum were TOKYO YAKYOKU by Ichikawa Jun that did not
attract as many people as most of the other Japanese films did, and MILK
by Austrian filmmaker Edgar Honnetschlaeger. MILK is an absurd tale
filmed and taking place in Tokyo and New York, centered around three
eccentric characters, Rika from Japan, Simon from Austria and Helen from
the US.


RAKKA SURU YUGATA
Kengo leaves Rika because of Hanako, a capricious girl who then decides
to move in with Rika... I guess this could have become a good film but
unfortunately Gozu Naoe turned Ekuni Kaori's novel into a rather
superficial movie whose pictures resemble TV aesthetics more than the
cinema's. And that is no wonder: She said it was her first film after 20
years of terebi. It never occurred to me that there could be more in
this film than a triangular story of lost love. But in her statement
after the screening Gozu said that the Kobe earthquake and other
disasters and crimes that have rocked Japan in the last few years should
be seen as the backdrop of RAKKA SURU YUGATA. The example of Rika who
overcomes her loss and grief after some mostly silent suffering was
meant to help us all be more genki and face or troubles. She chose more
elaborate words than I do now but this is roughly what she said. Either
I must have misunderstoood her film completely or maybe the very
self-confident Gozu-san is overestimating her art a little bit.

KICHIKU DAI ENKAI
Moritz de Hadeln, one of the festival's organizers, walked up to the
screen and introduced this film shown in the Panorama section (like
RAKKA SURU YUGATA) by saying that they had evaded any advertisement for
KICHIKU DAI ENKAI because they didn't want the wrong kind of audience to
show up. Whoever felt like leaving now or during the screening should
not hesitate to do so for the film contained a lot of violence, and
especially the last about 30 minutes were so sadistic and brutal that he
would be happy to buy those a coffee and give them back their money who
could not stand watching scenes like that. De Hadeln went on to say that
he had included KICHIKU DAI ENKAI in the festival's program anyway (and
in spite of his partners' protests) because he considered Kumakiri
Kazuyoshi a very talented director. It was a most unusual scene -- just
imagine you want to see a movie and are told to better go home by the
very person who chose to have that particular film on his festival... As
the film proceeded I realized what he had meant. There is a lot of
disgusting violence and perversion in this story about a militant group
of students who wait for their leader to be released from prison.
Kumakiri creates a tight and menacing atmosphere that makes it very
difficult not to take his pictures at face value. It was also said that
KICHIKU DAI ENKAI could not be shown in Japan. Obviously only a censored
version was screened at the PIA festival while the uncut version has
been shown only to a few journalists. Would those of you in Japan know
anything about this incident and has there been anything like a
discussion about this film? Is it Kumakiri?s first work?