Toronto int'l film fest

[Aaron Gerow]

Lisa asked,

>Any opinions on these choices?

>"Battles Without Honor 
>and Humanity" from Kinji
>> Jukasaku's yakuza series

If this is the first edition of the _Jingi naki tatakai_ series directed 
by Fukasaku Kinji, it is definitely worth a see.  Not only was it a 
redefinition of the yakuza genre, but also an effort to write postwar 
Japanese history through genre cinema (it begins, appropriately, with the 
bomb).


>> Tetsuya Nakashima's "Beautiful Sunday, Happy Go Lucky." 

A review of this is on my Kinema Club review site:

http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Reviews.html

Though at the time I wrote my review they were calling the film _Summer 
Tale_.

>Other films include Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "The Cure," 

Here's a draft of my review of _Cure_ that ran in the Daily Yomiuri last 
December. (Sorry I haven't put it up on the site yet!)

	Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), the serial killer in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 
brilliantly chilling Cure, keeps asking the same simple question of 
everyone he meets: "Who are you?"
	They give him their usual answers--school teacher, policeman, etc.--but 
Mamiya always comes back with the same question only a few minutes later. 
 "Who are you?"
	This repetitiveness partially has to do with what Mamiya has become: in 
his own words, "What was inside me has all escaped and now I am empty."  
His existence is entirely external: he has no memory (to the point of not 
remembering what happened a minute ago); no idea who he is (he can't even 
recognize his own reflection).  He is the epitome of existing only in the 
present, with no past, no inside--no identity.  While asking it of 
others, he himself cannot answer the question, "Who are you?"
	This inability, however, may also be the reason for his insistent 
questioning.  His quest is to make people realize that they, despite 
their simple answers to his query, really don't know who they are either.
	Since Cure is a horror thriller, this proves deadly.  In the story, 
Mamiya is a psychology student who, studying the work of Mesmer, has 
somehow discovered the way to empty other people, turn them inside out so 
that they commit acts of murder they've always wanted to do, but have 
repressed.
	That's the story, but what makes Cure one of the best films of the year 
is Kurosawa's superb evocation of the most fundamental instability: in 
who we are.  While most horror films let us confirm our identity by 
destroying that which is alien--not "us"--Cure hits home by undermining 
our certainty that we are not the monster ourselves.
	This is mostly done through the figure of Takabe, the detective assigned 
to solve these mysterious murders.  Played by Koji Yakusho (Unagi, 
Kamikaze Taxi) in yet another sure performance that proves him the best 
Japanese actor working today, Takabe is the representative of reason, 
voicing his and our goal of explaining these acts seemingly without rhyme 
or rule.
	In the end, however, his act of putting into words what is going on is 
not too different from the stories Mamiya asks his victims to tell--and 
then brutally enact--as he mesmerizes them.  Takabe's explanation 
ultimately makes him like Mamiya, a shift that shows how the forces of 
reason are undermined by their very quest to impose stability on a 
confusing world.
	Like in all good thrillers, Takabe the hero is Mamiya's double.  He 
alone understands the other meaning behind Mamiya's disturbing "Who are 
you?", in part because he, too, is aware of the instability of identity.  
His wife Fumie (Anna Nakagawa) is mentally ill, often acting in ways she 
cannot explain--just like Mamiya's victims.
	As our representative in the story, Takabe works to solve the crime and 
tend to his wife, expressing our desire for certainty in knowledge and a 
cure to abnormality, but Kurosawa ultimately refuses us fulfillment of 
that hope.  The occasional horror film has provided the teaser ending in 
which the hero, too, has turned into a vampire, but Cure's enigmatic 
conclusion makes us unsure of even that conclusion.  A Godard aficionado 
who has worked extensively in both horror (Sweet Home (1989) and Jigoku 
no keibiin (1992)) and action (the "Katte ni shiyagare" series), Kurosawa 
undermines the security of genre convention and thus the stability of 
cinema itself with deft editing that mixes reality and fantasy and 
creates more questions than it answers.
	Cure rises far above its genre status.  While a great horror film, it is 
simultaneously an investigation of the loss of identity in the postmodern 
age, a summoning of the return of what has been repressed in--and what is 
the underside of--our veneer of civilization and domestic tranquillity.  


>Sabu's "Unlucky Monkey," 

My review of that will appear in two weeks time.  Reviews of his previous 
films are on my site.  This is a much more gloomy film, as Sabu seems to 
be saying that the prejudices and social conventions that confined his 
characters in previous films can only be escaped through death.

>Satoshi Isaka's
>> "Detective Riko," 

Personally, I did not like his _Focus_ (see my review) and I think my 
suspicions about Isaka's talent were confirmed with this film: an attempt 
to depict the life of a working single mother (this time, a police 
detective) which falls into all the conventions about mothers, etc., 
which bad Japanese drama tends to fall into.  Frankly, the film doesn't 
know the first thing about the real situation.  As a detective mystery, 
it's also mediocre.

I must add, however, that before I saw the film, everyone was saying that 
the star, Takizawa Ryoko, looks just like my wife.  In some ways, they're 
right!  (It was a strange experience seeing that film!)

Aaron Gerow
YNU