TIFF Awards

[mark schilling]

I was on the jury of the TIFF Japanese Eyes section this year -- and so saw
all the eleven selections.

The other jury members and I quickly agreed on Yanagimachi's Who's Camus
Anyway for the
Best Picture Award. We also all liked the mockumentary Ski Jumping Pairs -- 
Road to Torino
and, after a bit of agonizing over honoring a comedy, gave it the Special
Award.

Yanagimachi told me that a small US distributor -- the name escapes me at
the moment --
has picked up Camus for release next year in New York, Chicago, Boston and
other major cities. No
sales yet in Europe, unfortunately.

I thought it an outrage that Whispering of the Gods walked away
empty-handed, while the jury showered awards
on What the Snow Brings, a conventional drama in an unusual setting, with a
strong performance by Sato Koichi
(who is looking more and more like his father, Mikuni Rentaro).

 Here's an abbreviated version of my Japanese Eyes wrap story for the Japan
Times:


Japanese Eyes at TIFF 2005

By Mark Schilling


....This year we had eleven films to choose from -- and no hesitation in
selecting the winner, Michio Yanagimachi's "Who's Camus Anyway" (Camus Nante
Shiranai).
Screened in the Directors Fortnight section of this year's Cannes festival,
Yanagimachi's first feature
film in a decade begins as a light-hearted semi-autobiographical examination
of modern college life,
with a plot revolving around a chaotic student filmproduction. (Yanagimachi
himself teaches film at
Rikkyo University)

But even in his brilliantly shot opening sequence, in which the students and
their teacher intersect and interact as they walk across campus, Yanagimachi
is planting
seeds of deeper concerns and themes. The characters not only spout film
references
(including a winking one, in the opening, to Robert Altman's similarly long
and
intricately choreographed sequence in "The Player"), but several begin to
live them. The
labor of production -- they are making a film based on Camus' "The
Stranger" -- 
becomes all absorbing, until they and those around them are confronted by
the real-life
implications of their various obsessions. Finally, fiction and reality begin
to merge, in
ways that resonate and disturb. A film that repays repeated viewings -- and
is the strongest
I've seen all year.

We gave the Special Award to something completely different, Masaki
Kobayashi's "Ski Jump Pairs -- Road to Torino 2006." Advertised as a "human
documentary," the
film is in fact a brilliant send-up of all those po-faced NHK docs on
triumphs-against-adversity. It then segues, midway, into -- well, I really
shouldn't say, only that I have never -- and I mean never -- seen a Japanese
film so
spit-choke, all-fours-in-the-air funny. Think "Airplane" on the ski slopes.
It's that
good.

I also quite liked Yoshihiro Fukagawa's "Okami Shojo" (When the Show Tent
Came to My Town), a film about kids in a provincial town in the early 1970s
that is
both entertaining, in a classic, slapsticky "Little Rascals" way, and
insightful
into childhood fears, curiosities, friendships and isolation. First-time
director  Fukagawa
manages this difficult balancing act smoothly, while drawing performances
from his young
cast that are clearly shaped, without being fake or coy.

Masahiko Makino (formerly Tsugawa) may have been another beginning director
with a film, "Nezu no Ban", in the section, but he also a
veteran actor with more than 150 credits, who belongs to a distinguished
film
business family with a lineage going back to grandfather Shozo Makino -- 
Japan's first true
director. His film, about a series of deaths that comically inflict a Kansai
rakugo (comic
storytelling) clan, headed by a randy old coot played by Makino's brother,
Hiroyuki
Nagato, is steeped in traditional show business lore. The puns in Kansai
dialect may not be
knee-slappers to outlanders (including foreigners parsing the only-adequate
subtitles), but
the film offers a fascinating inside look at rakugo and geisha life -- 
including a cutting
contest between two shamisen players trying to top each other's smutty
lyrics -- that you
will probably not find in "Memoirs of a Geisha."

Several other films in the section also had their pleasures and points.
Akira Osaki's
"Catchball-ya" (The Catch Man), a whimsical drama about a loser getting back
his groove by
playing catch for pay with strangers in a public park, was a solid single
that could
have used more magical thinking. Miako Tadano's "Sannen Migomoru" (Three
Year Delivery),
about a woman who carries her first child for three strange years, had
plenty of
magic, but little dramatic tension, beyond the obvious when and how.
Nobuhiko Hosaka's "So
Kamoshirenai," yet another in a long line of Japanese films
about the trials of senility, had strong performances by former pop idol
 Yukimura Izumi, playing an Alzheimer's-afflicted woman, and Harudanji
Katsura as her vexed
novelist husband, but was otherwise a straightforward melodrama with the
obligatory
tear-and-sigh ending.

One film I truly couldn't stick was Yosuke Nakagawa's "Starlit High Noon"
(Mahiru no Seiku), an empty exercise in piss-elegant noir starring Wang
Leehom as a young Taiwanese hitman inexplicably hiding out in Okinawa, where
he encounters and falls for an older woman, played by Kyoka Suzuki, who uses
the same Laundromat. Though male model handsome, Wang is no actor -- and
Suzuki, the best Japanese actress of her generation, blows him off the
screen.
Other than its co-production deal, this film has little reason to exist -- 
save for Suzuki's
one-woman, wasted-on-empty-space performance.