The viewing public often asks for originality, but when it arrives, they can't get to grips with it. This film is wild and provocative. I think as an orientation to it, the first thing to note is this is a comedy, but not signposted as one, so get your laughing gear ready. The second main thing to notice is that every single shot is a new camera position. I often find myself wincing in films when a really good shot is reused, it feels a little desperate, un-novel, and like the optical staff don't have access to visual abundance. This movie is kaleidoscopic, every image is new and fresh. No "shot reverse shot" nonsense here for the conversations. It is maybe worth referencing some speech from the characters, where they agree that they do not like either classical music or rock because it is too predictable, and they even refer to them as being the "soundtrack for war", the film avoids this belligerent aesthetic by never repeating itself visually or otherwise.
With the scripted part of the story, we are subject to conversations that are very unusual and baroque. It's tempting to pull out the adjective Brechtian, but Emigholz himself has referred to the acting as deadpan. Each of the conversations is concerned with a taboo albeit the first of these taboos, as Emigholz calls them, is psychoanalysis. I think not many people would see psychoanalysis as a taboo, so you don't get an easy entrance to the movie in terms of trying to understand its structure. However the movie does start to become almost insanely transgressive. Whilst almost any speech is going to be forgiven by those with an iron stomach, the choice to use actual photography of atrocities is genuinely hair-raising. The other taboos are: war (specifically here war guilt in Japan and Germany, and the philosophy of weapons manufacture, relationships between the young and old, incest, and cosmology (our complete irrelevance in that perspective). There is a fine line between discussing genuinely interesting but fraught subject matter, and outright provocation. There's an animated shot where a pixellated computer game girl crosses a street in an oil painting and gets splatted by a bus. That's provocation, laced a pitch black humour, but mostly I did find the conversations interesting and not provocation for the sake of it. I watched an interview with Emigholz about this movie and in it he referred to Guy Debord as a "bourgeois", yes the Marxist philosopher who came up with the concept of The Society of Spectacle. Emigholz is not worried about expressing outré opinions.
It is the section about war guilt that is the most shocking. It also contains a slight error in research, it says that no-one from Japan signed the Geneva Convention, in fact they did, but the signature was never ratified back home. There is a suggestion that modern Germans and Japanese are being turned into war guilt sausages. He does not of course shy away from talking about the actual war crimes of the past, in fact Japanese war crimes are hideously and exhaustively enumerated. There is also a question of whether Shinto-ism as an ideological broth, made committing atrocities more easy. I think the general point is hinted at, that you can get anyone to do something nauseatingly abject if you find the right buttons to press. The movie contains a strong joke about how to convince men from various nations not to board lifeboats in favour of women and children which is the link (you appeal to various key ideological symbols).
This film was a massive surprise to me because I only knew of Emigholz's purely architectural films - the films where he just points his camera at interesting architectural images and puts together a documentary. To be clear, he hasn't abandoned his interest in architecture, the film's genesis started with architecture, he wanted to make a film about the cities here since the start of the millennium. However what he has done is place actors and a spoken narrative in there, mostly unrelated to the locations excepting the occasional visual metaphor. This is quite a remarkable creative leap in Emigholz's career, and, I've since learned, started with Streetscapes (Dialogue) in 2017. Watching this movie feels a bit like being offered whisky in a barbershop, not exactly unwelcome, but unexpected.
It is a very beautifully lensed film, there is very little blurring and most compositions are complex, here is a quote from Emigholz: "I like an image that's totally saturated, saturated with content you know... and this is pleasure to do". It's a pleasure to watch as well!
A genuinely innovative film that has been massively unappreciated.
