Quick Shots - 08/Nov/2015

Japanese Film Festival

Just a quick note. I've been doing my annual interpreting gig out at the Japanese Film Festival. It's amazing that the year went by so quickly - seems only not long ago that I wrapped up Melbourne with them last year. Since then 3 out of the 4 people who ran the thing have been promoted or moved on and have bee replaced. The festival hasn't missed a bit but it's pretty weird not seeing Festival Director Mr. Konomi and the other two. If I add DF who left in 2014, it's the entire group who ran it for roughly the last 5years that turned over in little over 18 months. When I think about my own recent changes, it sure has been a year of changes.

The film selections look good this year and the guests from Japan are interesting as usual. Still, there didn't seem to be quite the same buzz as previous years. It's going to have to build up steam again.

Tent Poles And No-Budgets

Over in Japan, they're telling me the production slates are moving to two extremes where the big budget numbers are concentrated in the hands of fewer players, and the other independent films get smaller and smaller as budgets get tighter. The divergence has killed off the middle terrain of film making where the interesting films used to be. This mirrors developments in America where the tent pole films get bigger but the medium sized films have disappeared.

It's hard to pin a single reason upon it, but basically the tent pole pictures support a greater industrial structure that's already in place. The studios and TV stations have to budget to make the big summer hit and big Christmas hit somehow, and this means they our their resources into the tent pole pictures. In the mean time, technology has allowed people to make audiovisual content cheaply, so the assumption for investors has become, "surely you can make that for less". In both instances, content is suffering because as money gets too big, they can't take proper creative risks; and as money becomes short, there isn't going to be content worth shooting.

The Non-Competitive Casting Couch

The other interesting tidbit from this year's director is how sewn up is the casting arrangements. If the studios and casting agents and talent agencies collude to pool resources, then casting inevitably comes from the same talent agencies through the casting agent. The collision is such that auditions just don't happen for top actors. Now, top talent means they know what they're doing and you're getting a known commodity, but then the supporting cast comes from a mic smaller pool of actors when what you want is to cast a wider net.

According to the director, it means there isn't proper competition to get the best actors for the role and this has led to a certain same-y-ness in casting. It has all the bad parts of the old Hollywood style studio system without getting good results. He doesn't see things getting better because as budgets go up in the tentpole pictures fewer risks will be taken, and so in the name of taking fewer risks, they will keep casting from the diminishing, small pool of actors who are linked to the tentpoles, not through talent but by mere association.

That being said, it's still a nice problem to have from our point of view. Anyway, it was an interesting note from the frontline of film making in Japan.

Himizu

One May Well Wonder What It Means

Turns out this film that did well in Venice last year is a lot more warped than even the trailer presented. The title refers to a mole in regional dialect. It means, one who does not see the sun. The main character is a boy who aspires to being like the mole, quiet and underground, unmolested and unconcerned with the way of world. If that doesn't seem like a downer of a starting point, wait 'til you see the rest of this movie.

It's available at the moment on Fetch TV if you have that subscription. otherwise you might have to trawl through some Asian DVD shops in Chinatown or wait until SBS shows this one. They will. It's pretty different.

As usual, spoiler alerts apply.

What's Good About It

Sometimes a film comes along with the emotion dial turned up to max. The characters in this film have huge emotional commitment in everything they do. There is no subtle deflection of the mind that cannot be put under the microscope and characters simply lash out with wild abandon in the wake of the Tsunami devastation of 2011. Two years on from the event we're seeing films about the emotional impact the disaster had on people, and in many ways it is not as one would expect. The constant buzzing geiger counter in the ruins is more than spooky, it is like a semiotic bomb.

In this film, there are no pat answers, there are no easy solutions. There is a lot of human ugliness front and centre while it is difficult to understand if there ever is going to be a kind of moral centre to the film. It's nothing like a Hollywood film in that sense and I imagine that is why it won its plaudits.

Also, there's a lot of people slapping each other around. it's a bit like 'the Three Stooges' but without the laughs.

What's Bad About It

Some of the acting is cheesy; especially the young actors who are barely in command of their performance. There's too much form without meaning. They make gestures and do things but all it does is seem like they don't know what they're doing. The older actors are equally stagey and peculiar. The gestalt is great but there are too many different styles and modes of acting to form a unified whole. Instead, it comes across as a cluster of acting ideas and performances.

I'm also not a fan of the ending where you're led to believe one thing and then they turn it around the other way without a successful explanation. We're meant to guess at the  reasons for the transformation, but acting is so wild, you don't know if any of it really amounts the action that happens.

What's Interesting About it

You can watch a lot of movies and never come across a film as wildly played as this film. Some of the interactions are laughably big, while others are disturbingly big; but it's always big. Even the quiet moments of contemplation are captured in menacingly tight closeups. Not only are the characters larger than life, they're explosive angry figures. there is very little hierarchy of characters' importance to the story, just a wide circle of cause and effect coming from violent and rude acts.

The Slapping

The characters in this film have no problem slapping each other around. The girlfriend slaps the main character around a bit, even in fun and games and he's not too shy about returning the favour. They do it so often it really is like the Three Stooges although I doubt there's any reference point to that kind of comedy act.

We live in very genteel times where we eschew physical and corporal punishment with children. It naturally follows that we think the children don't do violence unto one another because they haven't been 'violentised' and inured to violent acts. Casual sadism is everywhere in the world of children. This seems to be the backbone of the slapping in this film, where kids are just naturally intrusive of one another's space.

Or it could simply be a business device to increase the general level of action. This wouldn't be surprising given that the source text for this film is a manga. There's a certain level of violence that is affirmed in manga fiction so it comes as no surprise to the reader that people slap each other around. it's only when you see it as a live action film that you are taken aback by the rude frequency of the slaps.

The Tohoku Disaster As Symbol

For some years there have been screen stories about how Japanese society is crumbling or falling apart from the edges. It's almost a cliche about Japanese films where the family is dysfunctional and the central action denounces the social structure. Every year there seems to be one of these films out at the Japanese Film festival, and they ave been building in ferocity for some time.

What's interesting about this film is that the film shows the aftermath of the disintegration of the family, but ties it in with the image of the ruins after the disaster. The mass of crushed buildings and vehicles and junk serve as an objective correlative to the action we see on the screen. It works very well on an image level except I get the nagging feeling that it is a bit exploitative of the disaster. The crumbling family we see on the screen goes through some Freudian ructions out of the necessity of its characters. The disaster doesn't really touch upon the character arc in any significant way.

The other characters surrounding the main character are all somehow marred by the disaster and have become dissociated urban homeless. It seems to be a kind of cheating to swap out one problem with the other and draw equivalences.

Schooling In Japan Sucks

I've said this elsewhere but schools in Japan are really terrible institutions. They average about 40 kids in a class and teachers run a line of discipline first teaching second. The worst teachers work in middle school where they wield inordinate amounts of power and tacitly support bullying structures of Japanese society, basically saying it's the acceptable norm. year after year middle school students commit suicide or refuse to go to school and everybody wonders why. It's quite pathetic given that a lot else is quite liberal in Japan. It might be the case that middle school is where the Japanese learn the double-think hypocrisy of what needs to be said and what needs to not be said.

With all that in mind, the most interesting part of the representation of society might be that the school never comes to check in on the two students who one day stop coming to school. There's nary any interest on the part of the teacher closest to these kids, who in turn is busy inciting idealistic nonsense, which is quite a cutting critique of Japanese political discourse about hope and the future. If the future was so important and the kids are going to grow up to be the leaders of that future, why is the school so structurally disinterested in their welfare today?

This isn't like the only film to cover this terrain, but in this instance I have to say the film goes a long way towards illuminating just what is wrong with the way people are educated in Japan. It's not the war atrocities everybody wants them to teach but don't, it's the tacit approval of hierarchical bullying and an utter lack of interest in being any other way.

Freud Comes Knocking

The central action beat in the story that really pays off nicely is how the son comes to killing the father. It is setup so that the father comes around drunk to tell the son he wishes he had died as a young boy, how he hates the son, and wishes him dead. Which is to say it's straight out of Freud; and so the slaying of the father fits right into the oedipal complex routine.

The only exception is that the son is not wanting to resolve his feelings for his mother and sublimate them; on the contrary, he probably wants to kill her too. The killing of the father is shot beautifully in one long shot that covers a great area in front of the camera. One imagines it would have taken all night to get that one right.

What's really scary about this film is that at the heart of the issue is this horrible act for which we cannot help but feel great sympathy and understanding. And once we are there, we're trapped with the boy in a society of hypocrisy and rampant corruption and criminality. There is no single act that can balance out the greater evil that is society. It is as if the Tohoku Disaster broke open a part of Japan, showing the inner workings; and none of it is all that pretty.

Japanese Film Festival Opens In Sydney

Just A Quick Note

The Japanese Film Festival kicked off last night, with the usual speeches at the Reception and a pretty cool film called 'After School'. It's one of those films where the narrative is broken up and tells you one story, only to reveal it is entirely another case. The first half leads you to believe it's a story about a guy who runs out on his pregnant wife, leaving his best friend from his high school days to look after his wife. By the end of the film, you have a totally different take on the people.

It's a straight forward style of directing without any tricky camera moves, very tastefully done. There are another 16 films assembled for the festival so I'll be in there to see as many as I can.

The Festival Director Mr. Konomi is a very astute curator with an exceedingly good eye for cinema. He used to be an editor for a Manga publisher, so it shows. One imagines that culling 17 films out of 300 releases must be very difficult, but every year the Festival surprises with its content. Each year, the films collectively paint a very sophisticated picture of Japan and Japanese cinema.

This is another reason I keep saying we simply have to make more to understand who we are and what our cinema is about. If you tried to run the equivalent festival in Tokyo of Australian cinema, we'd be stuck at 15, because that is all we make. It wouldn't be a selection at all, it would be a total showcase of everything we make each year, the good, the bad and ugly.