In short: Our Little Sister (2015)

Original title: Umimachi Diary

Hirokazu Koreeda (often written as Kore-eda, but I would prefer not to) is one of the masters of contemporary Japanese cinema any way you look at it. He is a director steeped in the Japanese tradition – think Ozu, his peers and what followed - of calm, subtle, and artfully staged films that treat themes which should be all rights be over the top and melodramatic, but come to a delicate, complex and human life without following modern ideas of how to treat a plot. Quite a few critics – from the West as well as from Japan - love to set this sort of thing up as a big difference between Japanese and “Western” filmmaking as a whole, an idea that to my eyes seems to ignore the whole history of Japanese popular cinema, which follows very much the same rules as the Hollywood model. But I digress.

Koreeda’s films, basically all focused on family relations and absent parents in one way or another, move in ways and at a pace all of their own, demanding patience and concentration from their viewers. That focus they repay in slowly enfolding movements of deep humanity, compassion, and an ability to actually teach you something about people, their ways of life and a way of looking at them without any didacticism whatsoever.

Our Little Sister, about three sisters who take in their teenage half-sister after the death of their estranged father, their relations, and all the unspoken things – not all of them bad – between them might be Koreeda’s most Koreeda film. There’s particularly little plot here; the film instead moves through a series of intimately observed scenes that make a lot of other examples of “observational” cinema look boring and empty thanks to the director’s ability to not just look at characters’ lives but make us understand it through editing choices, camera work, great, subtle acting (Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho and Suzu Hirose are incredibly perfect here as individual actresses as as well as an ensemble) and something rather less technical – call it a vibe, call it soul, call it a direct line to the ineffable.

That I’m ending up on these latter terms I find particularly interesting in the context of talking about a filmmaker and films this naturalistic – apparently, feelings of transcendence really can be invoked by a piece of art that never leaves the natural, realist world.

Past Misdeeds: The Incite Mill (2010)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Looking at the career of director Hideo Nakata, I can't avoid the impression he had his difficulties recovering from the catastrophe that was the US The Ring 2, possibly because being responsible for that one is a shame someone with even a little bit of pride in his work would have a hard time living down.

In Nakata's case, his decline isn't as horrible as it could be. In fact, compared with Takashi Shimizu, the state of Nakata's career is absolutely golden, seeing as he's not making something called Rabbit Horror 3D, and doesn't seem to have lost all his talent while slumming in Hollywood. The Incite Mill is a clear demonstration that he still has what made me fall in love with his earlier films.

The Incite Mill is a pretty typical entry into a sub-genre of the thriller occupied with putting a bunch of characters into an artificially locked down place, having them submit to peculiar and bizarre rules and observing them fastly starting to kill each other off, in part because People Ain't No Good™, in part because the party responsible for their imprisonment does some subtle and some not so subtle things to, well, incite them to murder. In this variation, the characters have come to the place of their imprisonment out of their own volition, for the promise of a surprising amount of money for just seven days of work in a psychological experiment. Of course, they didn't expect quite as much violence, nor that they'd be the stars in one of these popular Internet shows nobody in the cast has ever heard of you only encounter in movies.

As this is a Japanese movie, the rules element is quite heavily emphasised, emphasizing one of the hobby horses of Japanese pop culture of the last ten years or so in what I presume to be a reaction to the country's still heavily restrictive and regimented society and the resulting pressures to conform on the individual.

There are also many allusions to classic manor mysteries (ten little Indians ahoy), and the Cluedo-inspiring (or Clue-inspiring for you Americans) construction of that very mechanical sub-genre.At times, Nakata seems to want to escape the heavy artificiality of his set-up by pointing it out himself. To a degree, this works pretty well, though I couldn't help but begin to question parts of the story's basic set-up I would probably not have questioned in a movie less knowingly artificial. Just to take an obvious example: how come the police hasn't gotten involved if this is not the first time this little show has been broadcast? I can believe in police laziness and incompetence without a problem, but I'm pretty sure this sort of thing would at least have been in every news show in the country, and therefore nothing the characters could not know about. And while I'm thinking about logical problems, how is it that most of the characters actually believe anyone (especially people who never ever show their faces to them) would pay enormous amounts of money for them to take part in a simple psychological experiment? I find this sort of thing much harder to believe than the existence of ghosts, aliens, and vampires, but your mileage may very well vary.

The Incite Mill's best moments are interesting enough to let me forget these doubts, however. Besides taking cues from manor mysteries and the brethren in its own sub-genre, the film also does some things that are bound to help a guy like me forget little niggles like logic problems and a lack of coherent worldbuilding. Namely, there is a slight SF element in the form of one of these new-fangled ceiling-bound robots with impressive gripper arms (as well as some useful gadgets). Even though it isn't talking or beeping melodically like a good robot should, it's still there to throw people in jail, inefficiently patrol the Paranoia House's (yes, that's how the place of the experiment is named - surely no reason to get paranoid) corridors at night, and to delight my heart to no end. After all, everything is better with robots.

I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention the good ensemble cast, consisting - among others - of actual movie star Tatsuya Fujiwara (with whom Nakata has worked before on the superior Death Note spinoff L: Change the World), veteran actor Kinya Kitaoji, veteran TV actress Nagisa Katahira, and some other members of the TV actor and idol business (Haruka Ayase, Satomi Ishihara, Takura Ohno and others). All of them (yes, even the male idols) deliver performances that are generally convincing and often even quite intense. There's never the feeling that you're watching idols act. Rather, these are actors who also take part in the idol rat race, but do know about more than pushing their physical assets into the camera. There's a certain degree of overacting on display, but overacting seems to fit the hysteria-inducing situation the characters are in quite well. Plus, I prefer conscious and artful overacting to the near-catatonic blandness that is so trendy in English language cinema right now. I understand, all that botox makes one's face difficult to move, but still…


Hideo Nakata for his part has never been a flashy director, usually preferring a style that subtly influences an audience’s perception of a story and its characters to one that is always pointing at the director's technical abilities but which usually works to the detriment of the narrative. Nakata is too self-assured a director to have much of a need for showing off. If you want to see his technical accomplishments, you will find them in the careful framing of scenes, in the precise rhythms his films' editing creates, and in Nakata's strong sense for iconic imagery that works as an actual, living part of his movies. In The Incite Mill, Nakata shows that all of these talents are still alive and well in him, serving him as well in his new genre of choice as they did when he was making the horror films which made me fall in love with Japanese horror.

On WTF: The Incite Mill (2010)

While the once great Takashi Shimizu makes absolutely horrible films now, that other core director of the Japanese horror renaissance Hideo Nakata seems to have slowly recovered from his horrible US The Ring 2. Nakata's making thrillers with SF elements now, and he's actually very good at it.

Case in point is The Incite Mill, the film I talk about at length over at WTF-Film today.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you. The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat.

The Brothers Bloom (2008): I suspect there's only two ways people can go with this one - either they'll fall in love with Rian Johnson's highly stylized and playful film about lies and stories so good they can become the truth, or they'll call it pretentious and be annoyed by its obvious cleverness. Me, I'll never be found among those saying even a single bad word about a film that can pull off a karaoke version of the Band's "Sleeping".

Man of Vendetta (2010): The directorial debut of Woo Min-ho has most of the qualities I associate with South Korean thrillers: it's as slickly directed as any major Hollywood film, but much more willing to go into really nasty and unpleasant places without needing to wallow in the nastiness more than is necessary. It's acted excellently by a cast that knows the difference between "sparse" and "wooden". It has a script that doesn't feel the need to always add another twist if that twist would be to the detriment of mood and characters, yet still knows and uses all the tricks of its genre.

Still, while I can and do admire these achievements, Man of Vendetta never clicked with me emotionally. It might be that the film's keeping of its child-kidnapping and murdering psycho something of a cipher without backstory makes it difficult for me to be all that frightened of or shocked by him, or just that the "lone civilian fights psycho for his little daughter" format is quite played out, even if its realized this technically proficient. For whatever reason, my admiration never turned into actually caring, and a film that was supposed to have an emotional impact just didn't.

Cyborg Girl (2008): Speaking of movies that don't have the emotional impact their directors seem to want them to have easily leads to this Japanese science fiction comedy romance melodrama (no, really) with Haruka Ayase and Keisuke Koide, directed by South Korean Jae-young Kwak whom you might know from My Sassy Girl. Guy falls in love with a time-travelling android built by his own future self to safe himself from serious bodily harm and a major disaster that is pretty uncomfortable to watch this shortly after the Japanese earthquake. Hilarity, a bit of friendly violence (yay!) and cloying, overly drawn-out sentimentality ensues. And no, there's nothing at all creepy about the film's set-up, at least nothing Kwak (also responsible for the script) knows of. Though the two leads really do their best with what they are given, Cyborg Girl is just too overloaded to get the tears out of me that it wants its audience so badly to cry. I'm perfectly willing to be moved by a weirdly artificial tragedy, but the film's tendency to just wallow in it all the time feels cynical and manipulative where it's supposed to be sad and heart-warming. The here melodrama just feels terribly artificial in all the wrong ways.

 

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Ichi (2008)

A young blind woman called Ichi (Haruka Ayase) wanders through ancient Japan as a traveling shamisen player. She was cast out of a goze house for having an affair with a customer, never mind that it wasn't an affair, but rape. In her mind, she hasn't got much to live for anymore. There is only reason Ichi is actually still making an effort to live. She wants to find the blind man who brought her to the goze house and returned from time to time to teach her to use a swordcane and who was as much of a father to her as anyone ever was. It is in fact possible that the man is her biological father.

When she comes to the area around a small inn town, she meets a charming but seemingly cowardly ronin named Touma Fujihira (Takao Osawa). During their first meeting, Touma rather heroically tries to protect her from a group of outlaws, but is a wee bit hindered in it by his own inability to draw his sword. Ichi doesn't have those kind of problems and slaughters the outlaws in a few seconds.

Touma is intrigued by Ichi, even though she acts about as emotive and warm as a stone. She probably reminds him of his mother, whom he accidentally blinded in a sword training accident. That accident is the reason for his trouble with swords. As long as he fights with training weaponry, everything is fine (we'll later see that he is an even better fighter than Ichi), but drawing his actual weapon to fight is beyond his abilities.

The ronin, who is an aimless wanderer like Ichi, stumbles into the conflict that makes this inn town so special. The town is run by the Shirakawa group, the sort of honorable yakuza you'll mostly find in ninkyo eiga. It's just too bad that they are terrorized by the gang of outlaws of which Ichi's would-be rapists were only a small part. These people, the bakin gang (second in command: Riki Takeuchi, oh yes!) once were of a much higher position in life and have now made it their job to make everyone else as miserable as they are themselves. They are quite effective at that.

As things go, Ichi and Touma are drawn into the conflict for different reasons, both bound for some kind of change with the way they live with their trauma.

As a fan of the classical Zatoichi films with Shintaro Katsu, I was quite skeptical about a re-boot/re-think of the series with a female protagonist. To my delight, I found a film that may not reach the heights of the best of the original series, yet is very serious about being a chambara in the spirit of the older films. It also isn't a real re-boot, but more of a sequel with a new character. The film never outright says that Ichi's father figure is the original Ichi as played by Shintaro Katsu, but hints strongly and effectively at it.

After a relatively slow and not all that promising beginning, the film soon starts to hit one of my personal narrative kinks really hard when it turns into the story of two heavily traumatized people (Ichi herself does in fact suffer some of the classical symptoms of PTSD), who don't "get over their traumas" (because one does not), but start to live and change again. It's also not a film about love as the all-conquering power that makes every trauma go away (as taught by Hollywood), yet it also doesn't say that love and human kindness aren't necessary and helpful. In other words, Ichi is one of the few films that gets this aspect right.

I'm also quite taken with the fact that the film grants its minor characters a little more depth (and good lord, even character arcs! some of them even not ending in death!) than usual in the genre, enough to keep the less than original plot fresh and put everything on the character base that is fitting for a Zatoichi film.

The acting itself is mostly alright. You'll know just about everyone here from one Japanese direct to DVD production or the other, so you'll probably know that everyone here is perfectly capable to give a solid to good performance, with Osawa's Touma and Yosuke Kobuzuka's young yakuza leader as the stand-outs.

Ayase (being an idol, not an actress) is technically the least convincing actor, but she delivers what she is supposed to deliver, which is mostly to look pretty in rags and try to emote as little as possible since she's shut herself off from most of her feelings. She is also quite fantastic in her few action scenes, giving her Ichi a threatening, nearly ghostly presence through body language alone.

The action sequences aren't overtly spectacular, but effective and quite beautiful in their way. Director Fumihiko Sori does some interesting things with a rhythmic use of speed-ups and slow-motion I don't think I have seen before.

The only thing I found disappointing (and probably the part of the movie that keeps it below the Zatoichi films of - for example - Kenji Misumi) is the general look of the picture. Colours, lightning and film stock have the usual (quite ugly) look of a Japanese direct to DVD production - probably inescapable in this context, but we're at least not talking Onichanbara-ugly here - making it not as interesting to look at as one would wish.

But honestly, with this script and the respect for the classic samurai films of the chambara sub-genre the film breathes, I would probably not even complain when you could see a microphone arm smack dab in the middle of the picture for the complete duration of the film.

 

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