Jellyfish

"Bright Future (Akarui mirai)" feels very much like a Sam Shephard play, with its themes of stifling fathers and rebelling sons and sibling responsibility between brothers, all suffused with irrational violence.

There's even a continuing leitmotif of a cowboy Western musical riff when magic realism takes over from the unrelieved quotidian of men who work with the detritus of an almost post-apocalyptic-seeming society, from a laundry to an appliance recycling workshop, and condescended to by their biological and putative family members with more money and much nicer apartments.

The characters seem to need to strike out with either Raskolnikov-ian or manipulative acts of violence as existential acts to affect their environment ("acclimating to Tokyo" is how one character metaphorically puts it) to be sure they're alive or having an impact on the living.

The main characters, well-matched by Tadanobu Asano as the scarily manipulative brother figure and Jô Odagiri as his even more depressed acolyte, are so alienated that the rigid others around them assume they are developmentally disabled.

I'm quite sure I didn't get anywhere near all the Goddard-ian symbolism, from the production design of the characters' seedy living arrangements to the phosphorescent beauty of poisonous jellyfish, which are used beyond the frogs in "Magnolia" in entrancing and haunting images like Conrad's fascination of the abomination.

The conclusion seems hopeless in a clouded fade into "A Clockwork Orange"-like, thrill-seeking gang of aimless young men wearing Che T-shirts, with a brightly hypocritical pop song about the future playing on the soundtrack.

I never knew that Tokyo had so many interesting bridges and canals.

I haven't seen any other films written or directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa to know if I just saw a bad print or if the washed out, almost black-and-white, fuzzy digital-video-seeming look was intentional.

I think this is not an easy film to grasp. Someone may well hate or disgust it, until he grasps what Mamoru represents and what is the theme of this movie.He doesn't look human at all. He never shows real emotion nor intention. So what is he? Is he a pure evil, or a ghost as in fact came back later in the movie? One way to understand him is not to see him as a real figure, but as question, question from the director Kurosawa. The question is double question. One is to the older generation, which is; Can you accept him and his generation? Another question is to the younger generation, which is; What do you do in the absence of an idealistic and convenient advocator like Mamoru?

In the case of the two, Yuji(Nimura) and Mamoru's father, things went well.They found them understandable and lovable. But, as known from the dialog of Mamoru's father, "I forgive you, I forgive you all," this is a question to all the individuals, younger or older.

Can we really accept the young so dangerous and sensitive like a jelly fish? Can we love them so much as to reach for them? Or, as a young, can we understand the elder so selfish and ugly but sometime has real love for the young?

What's implied in this movie is that the chances for the recovery of the relationship between two gegerations are still left and that the strragle goes on to forever.

Akarui mirai is a film that has one theme, despair. We see a Japanese society that offers little in the way of hope, prosperity, fun or happiness. A chance for a bright future is denied to the young and has already passed up the old. Our two main characters live lives that are pointless and dull. Our protagonist momentarily feels that at least he can claim being good as arcade games as an accomplishment, but soon sees that he is not even good at that. The two soon see that even their "successful" boss, who has a wife and child, has no life worth celebrating or enjoying. Such despair will cause one of the two friends to give up on a bright future and one to make one last attempt at finding hope for that bright future, but sadly, it appears very doubtful that that bright future will come.

Akarui Mirai has a lot going for it. Somewhere in the mess of metaphor and "art for art's sake" is a good story with a strong message and good images. Unfortunately things get typically nonsensical with the lesser Kurosawa behind the camera. Ok, that's harsh, but why can't this guy find a way to tell his story coherently AND make use of the positive aspects of his style. I like art-house movies, I like esoteric Japanese dramas, I like quirky filmmaking, but I don't like this movie. It's the type of movie I dislike most in fact, it's a badly made film pretending to be a good one. I trusted it, and it basically took me for a ride to nowhere and left me there.

I admit, the movie has it's moments, the lyrical beauty of the Jellyfish, one of the movie's most powerful images, are wonderful. The performance of the leads is good. There's some humor sprinkled here and there, but for what reason? I couldn't read the tone of the movie... Is this a fariytale? Is it a drama? There's just so much jammed onto that screen, and yet nothing. It's basically a bunch of nice ideas, presented in an incredibly lifeless manner. I can't imagine who would find any of this fulfilling?

Whatever Kiyoshi Kurosawa is to the Japanese audience, for Americans he's distinctly an acquired taste. "Cure "struck me immediately however as haunting, creepy, and drably beautiful; it's just that one can't imagine a steady diet of such stuff. "Pulse", typically stylish and moody, is completely different (and too similar to the "Ringu" franchise), but the only other Kurosawa I've seen so far, "Bright Future," is something else again. Symbolic interpretations of the two aimless, dangerous boys as some kind of statement about Japan's youth seem simple-minded and naive, though surely the ironic title makes that possibility all too obvious. Anyway, the presence of young people both does and does not mean anything in Kurosawa's films. He works very loosely within genres that appeal to youth, but his approach is consistently indirect and enigmatic. What strikes me is the relationship between Nimura and Mamoru--roommates and buddies on the surface, but underneath slave and master, follower and sensei, or symbiotic zombie couple. Their lack of affect turns modern Japanese youth on its head because they're quietly terrifying and somehow also super cool, Nimura's ragged clothing a radical fashion statement and his wild hair and sculptured looks worthy of a fashion model.Mr Fujiwara is the ultimate bourgeois clueless work buddy jerk (he combines two or three different kinds of undesirable associate); but we don't usually kill them. Kurosawa films seem to usually go in the direction of some kind of muted apocalypse, but they proceed toward it casually, as if he didn't quite care where things were going.

That's because the atmosphere and look of his films are the real subjects; like any great filmmaker he begins and ends with image and sound. Note the bland, cheerful music that pops up at the darnedest places. The relationship that develops between Nimura and Shin'ichirô, Mamoru's father after Mamoru is no more, and the scenes of Shin'ichirô's cluttered yet desolate workshop/dwelling recall Akira Kurosawa's Dodeskaden but also Italian neorealism and the clan of directionless but uniformed young bad boys who wander through the street in the long final tracking shot evokes Antonioni and the mute clowns in Blow-Up. Kiyoshi Kurosawa's framing, his use of empty urban long shots, is akin to the vision of Antonioni. If it's true that this cool stuff is all too appealing to film school dropouts ready to concoct a deep interpretation of every aimless sequence, it's also true that Kurosawa like no other living director creates his own haunting and disturbing moods, and it would be fun to compare this movie with Bong Joon-ho's boisterous "The Host."

Really an 8.5 at least, for originality.