Left Field Cinema

Modern Japanese Cinema has been dominated by two names (animation not withstanding); Takeshi Kitano and Takeshi Miike, but in recent years both have become decreasingly successful at wooing international audiences and arguably peaked in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Kitano hasn’t had a major release in the UK since Zatoichi (2003) and Miike, although remaining a very prolific filmmaker, hasn’t directed a film of significant note since Ichi the Killer (2001). With some of Japan’s limelight being stolen by their neighbours to the south like Thailand, South Korea and Vietnam, the land of the Rising Sun is in danger of being overshadowed on the world cinema map. At one time Japan’s only major Asian contender on the world stage was Hong Kong, now that rival has all but disappeared, but Asian cinema from other nations is exploding with the works of Anh Hung Tran, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Park Chan Wook and Ki-duk Kim, all vying for international attention in their own ways. Although in Japan the likes of Shinji Aoyama and Kiyoshi Kurosawa have been receiving some attention outside their homelands with Eureka (2000) and Tokyo Sonata (2008) respectively, neither director has been consistent enough to warrant the sweeping accolades of cinephilia which Kitano and Miike have enjoyed. Even the celebrated Foreign Language Oscar Winner Departures (2008) from Yojiro Takita, Yoji Yamada’s Samurai trilogy or the critically beloved and bemused Love Exposure (2008) from Shion Sono have done little to raise Japanese hopes. But there is one director who arguably deserves more praise than any of the aforementioned – Hirokazu Koreeda.

Koreeda has just seven fiction feature films on his directorial credits (with an eighth on the way). He debuted with Maborosi (1995) a fantastic and bold exploration of grief; a young woman is widowed after her husband commits suicide by deliberately walking towards an oncoming train; she remarries and moves to the countryside but never truly makes peace with her husband’s demise because his suicidal motives remain a mystery. Played out almost entirely in wide angle shots (paying particular homage to Yasajiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse) and regularly intercutting events with images of trains passing through the Japanese wilderness as a ghostly visual metaphor for the dead husband passing through the widow’s soul. This is bold cinema, as emotionally effecting as it is visually impressive, the breathtaking emotional climax is played out entirely in a silhouetted wide shot, a brave directorial choice for a first time director to make, but actually this sort of risk taking is probably what ensured Koreeda’s success in the future as it went on to win Koreeda the best director award at the Venice Film Festival. Maborosi is a distinctive film made with one eye on the cinematic past, something that Koreeda would return to in his career - Still Walking (2008) being very close in style. However the most prominent theme that can be taken from his debut and a theme that re-occurs throughout his work to date - the investigation of death and the resultant effect on the living. Whether this theme takes centre stage as in Maborosi, Still Walking, After Life (1998), Distance (2001) or Hana (2006) or lies patiently in the background as in Nobody Knows (2004) or Air Doll (2009). Koreeda is man who is not afraid, indeed seems almost obsessed, with investigating the aspects of death and dying. This obsession is possibly born out of his own life, his grandfather dying of Alzheimer’s disease when Koreeda was just six years old. This is not to imply that Koreeda’s works are autobiographical or to accuse Koreeda of harbouring miserablist sensibilities; his films are more often hopeful and conclude on notes of optimism. He often offers his protagonists and audiences closure and he rarely dwells on the negative despite his thematically morbid fascination with the end of life.

Koreeda is currently touring the festivals with his latest offering, Air Doll, for which he is gaining critical attention. He still doesn’t enjoy the sort of hype that Kitano or Miike so frequently receive despite being a more consistent filmmaker than either in terms of quality. One possible reason for his lack of notoriety is the absence of sensational elements within his films; he doesn’t make J-horror or Yakuza films; whilst relegating Miike or Kitano to either genre would be nothing short of reductive, it is a fair observation that many of their respective fans discovered both directors as a result of their more generic output (Miike’s brand of grim and bloody horror and Kitano’s equally grim and unrelentingly violent gangster action). The former UK distributor Tartan Video once ran a line of titles which they catagorised as “Asian-Extreme”, they capatalised on the J-horror phenomena post Miike’s Audition (1999) and Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) – you wouldn’t find any of Koreeda’s films released under this category. Though, and this depends on the marketing when it’s eventually released here, Air Doll may capitalise on such dubious patterns of selling. Air Doll, in which a human-size blow up sex doll comes to life could be seen as perfect fodder for the “Asian Extreme” label. It contains vivid and explicit nudity and a certain amount of uncomfortable violence and gross humour. However, unlike what Miike would have done with the film, Koreeda very much plays to his art house strengths and makes the film sweet, lush and immensely emotional. It is a testament to this most versatile of directors that instead to taking the easy route with such material and making either a sex comedy or a sexually violent film, Koreeda manages to make a film of warmth and compassion despite, indeed because of, the out-there subject matter.

Koreeda is very much a cineaste and his films reflect this, Maborosi and Still Walking show a deep influence of Naruse and Ozu, both being delicate yet striking character-centred works with slowly unfolding dramatic arcs, however his palette is broader than even these two great Japanese masters. His fifth film, Hana, is clearly a work influenced by both the visual style and the storytelling acumen of another great Japanese filmmaking hero, Akira Kurosawa; add in the sub-plot of the video store worker in Air Doll (and a mention of Angelopolous’ The Beekeeper) and you have clear evidence of a filmmaker in love with the history of cinema, particularly the cinema of his home country. His sophmore, and in my opinion best film, After Life, is arguably the most joyful film about the art of filmmaking ever made, a humanist exploration of life after death where those who’ve passed on arrive at a dilapidated office building/hostel and are told they’ll spend a week in this building during which time they have to select one memory from their lives (a happy memory preferably) which they’re to spend the rest of eternity existing within. Once they’ve selected their memory the team who run the facility work to recreate it on film for them, once the film is screened for them they’ll become one with the film forever. It is a bizarre masterpiece that never succumbs to the temptation of explaining why the after life looks like modern life and uses modern equipment like film cameras and videotapes, but instead explores the power film and the filmmaking process has in capturing our hearts and minds whilst simultaneously posing a great conversation starting question: if you could choose one memory from your life to date to exist within forever what would it be? Once again Koreeda holds back an emotional punch until the final reel, a tear-jerking moment when one of the central characters finally moves on to the others side is devastating and unforgettable cinema. By predominantly rooting himself in a more classical form of Japanese cinema, and not falling foul of modern populist conceits, he has made himself increasingly popular at film festivals and with the critics, but will sadly never reach larger audiences. Arguably his films are overlooked because of both their style, as mentioned, and their thematically challenging approaches to death. The number of his films currently available on DVD is telling, Hana is currently only available on region 1; After Life and Maborosi are out of print and only available to purchase at extortionate prices online (£49 for After Life at the time of writing, but both are available to rent from LoveFilm in the UK); Distance is only available on region 3. But Still Walking is available on region 2 and Nobody Knows is available on both Region 1 and 2 DVD.

Koreeda’s background in documentary filmmaking doesn’t always manifest itself on screen visually (exceptions being the handheld photography in Distance and Nobody Knows and the extended talking head interview scenes in After Life). This background more commonly manifests itself on screen thematically - the majority of his films deal with real-life situations, some are inspired or based on real events like Distance and Nobody Knows, others are deeply personal portrayals of a group of individuals. Reality is never far from Koreeda’s films, even in his more metaphysical outings After Life and Air Doll there is a sense of emotional reality even if a physical reality isn’t present; Still Walking is an engaging example of this. The film follows a family reunion on the anniversary of the eldest son’s death in a tragic accident; the dynamics portrayed (particularly in relation to the grandparent’s marriage and their relationships with their youngest grandchildren) often invoke the real life situations that many of us have found ourselves in. The film, when viewed from the daughter-in-law character’s perspective, is a perfect reference point for what it’s like to visit the in-laws and be witness to a series of slow boiling familial conflicts the origins of which you know nothing about - It’s an experience many of us can relate to. Koreeda offers rounded characters with real depth in his films perhaps never more so than in Still Walking.

Arguably Koreeda’s greatest strength is his versatility. There is a tendency amongst cinephiles to revere the most visually and thematically consistent of directors. The auteur’s who continually make the same film over and over again or whose look and style are instantly recognisable on screen. I am not immune from this tendency, some of my favourite directors fall into this category: Ingmar Bergman, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, Ozu etc. All of whom can be accused of simply recycling a series of narratives, themes, characters, visuals and or techniques throughout multiple films. In this respect Koreeda is more like Stanley Kubrick, David Lean or Terrance Malick. He has never told the same story twice, he has never restricted himself to a particular time period or genre and his approach to each film is informed by the subject and story of the film in question. From the stately awe-inspiring photography of Maborosi and Still Walking to the hand-held camera work of Distance and Nobody Knows, he has proven himself time and time again to be a highly adaptable filmmaker. You’d be hard pressed to find two Japanese films that differ quite as much as Distance and Hana; Distance being an ultra realistic film with extremely rough cinematography, sometimes images are barely at exposure on the print so you can hardly see what’s occurring on screen (deliberately so). The story follows four relatives of four dead members of a cult who travel into the wilderness where those closest to them lived and through flashbacks recall what happened to their family members and how they came to be parted. Hana is a period piece following a “reluctant Samurai” who has been sent by his family to avenge his father’s murder but would rather be a school teacher. It’s a beautifully shot and well crafted deconstruction of the Samurai mythos and one that propagates a very moral message about ending the cycle of violence which is inherited from one generation to the next. There is such a huge difference in tone and content yet only five years sit between the two productions. Admittedly both films still focus on the effect of death on the individuals left behind (violent death in both cases) but the eventual resolutions and the means through which this recurring theme is explored are completed opposed. Mabrosi, After Life, Distance, Hana and Still Walking all focus on letting go of the memory of loved one’s who’ve died; but each film does so in completely different ways from completely different angles – Koreeda never retreads old ground and the variance in style and tone means that audience members have to look very closely to realise that all his films address this issues in one way or another. Kitano and Miike occasionally divert away from their signature styles and stories but Koreeda never had a signature to begin with. That he manages to maintain his voice within his seven very different films, in the same way as Lean, Kubrick or Malick do, is a testament to his abilities and the strongest endorsement of his work I can offer. Every now and then a cinemagoer discovers a filmmaker and becomes instantly hooked on their work and must view all of their films within as short a space of time as possible - Koreeda is one such filmmaker and is definitely my big discovery for 2010. If I find a more impressive director in the remaining months of this year I shall be very, very surprised.

M.Dawson
Additions by Wilson McLachlan