Cure and Tsumetai chi

[Aaron Gerow]

This is just to let you folks know that I have posted my reviews of 
_Cure_ and _Tsumetai chi_ on the reviews site on Kinema Club.  Since I 
posted the _Cure_ review recently, I won't do it here, but below is my 
review of _Tsumetai chi_.


An Obsession

Japanese title: Tsumetai chi
Production Company: Tohoku Shinsha, Taki Corporation
Release: 20 December 1997
Length: 109 min.
Format: 35 mm
Color: Color

Staff:
   o Director: Aoyama Shinji
   o Screenplay: Aoyama Shinji
   o Photography: Ishii Isao
   o Music: Yamada Isao, Aoyama Shinji
   o Art Director: Shimizu Tsuyoshi
   o Editor: Aoyama Shinji

Cast:
   o Saga Sosuke: Ishibashi Ryo
   o Shimano Kozo: Suzuki Kazuma
   o Endo Kimiko: Toyama Kyoko
   o Saga Rie: Nagashima Eiko
   o Ichii Yukio: Suwa Taro
   o Ichii Aiko: Izumi Akiko
   o Tenno Seiichi: Hiraizumi Sei
   o Mita Shigeki: Yanagi Yurei
   o Young man: Saito Yoichiro

Review

                     A Stolen Gun Links Murder and Love

In only the year and a half since exploding on to the feature film scene
with his shocking portrait of alienated youth, Helpless (1996), the 
prolific
Aoyama Shinji has already turned out three more movies, including his new
one, An Obsession. At a time when young directors are lucky to shoot one
film every few years, if at all, the fact all four are outstanding works 
is
testimony to Aoyama's amazing craftsmanship as a filmmaker.

Working in the gangster and action genres has helped find him work, but 
like
the best of the 1950s American B-movie directors, Aoyama has consistently
presented a personal vision between the de rigeur action scenes, one which
has made him one of the most promising filmmakers today. His touch has
ranged from the disturbingly cold in the violent Helpless to the comically
grandiose in Wild Life. But in all his films, he has focused on the
alienation of his own generation--youths without a secure sense of 
identity
or moral values who are engaged in a desperate search for meaningful 
contact
with others.

An Obsession is Aoyama's remake for the 1990s of Akira Kurosawa's Stray 
Dog
("Nora inu," 1949). The basic plot situation is the same: a cop, after
losing his gun to a killer, sets out on a search for the criminal who in 
the
end is all too disturbingly similar to the hero. Under Kurosawa's 
humanistic
world view, Stray Dog presented the fundamentally shared nature of 
Japanese
suffering amidst the Occupation and postwar poverty. An Obsession, 
however,
is different.

The film begins with a fin-de-siecle, apocalyptic sense of insanity which
Kurosawa's humanism could never tolerate: The detective Saga (Ishibashi 
Ryo)
doesn't merely have his gun stolen (as in Stray Dog)--he is first shot by 
an
assassin who had just killed an Aum-like cult leader--and then loses his 
gun
to Shimano (Suzuki Kazuma), a nihilistic genius who is terminally ill and
begins offing people not to survive, but as part of his own disturbing
design.

Saga's search for Shimano is doubled by the search for human contact that
both men share. After he is shot, Saga's wife, Rie (Nagashima Eiko),
divorces the workaholic husband who basically never gave her a care, 
leaving
Saga to wonder about the meaning of personal relationships. His doubts 
over
whether two people can really come together in love are deepened through
conversations with Shimano's ex-girlfriend Kimiko (Toyama Kyoko), who 
tells
him of Shimano's conviction that love can only be proved in death.

It is these two couples, more than Saga's obsessive pursuit of Shimano,
which occupy the film's philosophical center. Shimano and Kyoko represent 
a
young generation with no place to go and no values to call their own--the
only certainty they can find is in a love solely verified by the mutual
decision to die. Death permeates their world and that of the streets of
their town as eerie death squads dressed in anti-radiation gear travel
around and execute people at the edges of the film's frame.

Aoyama sympathizes with the young couple's nihilistic lack of direction, 
but
as in all his films, it is the confrontation with death that prompts his
heroes eventually to choose life and their own moral basis for living. In
the end Saga and Rie present the grim and hard, but still hopeful reality 
of
human contact. This could be called Aoyama's humanism, the nitty-gritty 
fact
of being fallibly human that he so brilliantly evoked in Two Punks
("Chinpira," 1996). It is not, however, the universalistic humanism of
Kurosawa. In Aoyama's world, we all begin alone and must create our own
morals through confrontation with death and the need for human
relationships.

Aoyama thus presents in An Obsession a message both personal and
generationally relevant. But if one were to find fault with this film, the
least strong of the four so far, it is precisely in its philosophically
schematic nature. Aoyama has a strongly allegorical side--which is is 
often
abstract and unrealistic. He is at his best when that tendency is tempered
by the grim humanity of his characters. In An Obsession, however, symbols
like the death squads stand out too much as symbols, conflicting in their
nature with the realism of relationships like that of Saga and Rie. An
Obsession being his first original screenplay since Helpless, one wonders 
if
Aoyama wouldn't be better served working with stories or screenplays 
written
by a third party (as in Chinpira and Wild Life) to help tone down the
allegory, and work out his own cinematic contact with the Other.

Reviewed by Aaron Gerow
onogerow at angel.ne.jp

Originally appeared in The Daily Yomiuri, 18 December 1997, p. 9.

Copyright 1997: The Daily Yomiuri and Aaron Gerow


Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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