APAN CUTS July 10- 20, 2025 REVIEWS [Archive] - FilmLeaf

Chris Knipp

07-08-2025, 03:08 PM

http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20tek2.jpg
KYOZO NAGAATSUKA IN TEKI COMETH

DAIHACHI YOSHIDA: TEKI COMETH (2024)

Gerontion

Recommeded by Nick Newman in The Film Stage's (https://thefilmstage.com/10-films-to-see-at-japan-cuts-2025/) list of ten films to see in this year's Japan Cuts. He thought it was the best feature at this year's Tokyo International Film Festival. Well, they did too: it won the best film, best actor, and best director awards there. This is a subtle film about the onrush of old age. It's a process film. Things look great at first, but they're going nowhere good, and toward the end become spooky and catsstrophic. The greatest loss of control in old age is loss of control of the mind, a process Teki Cometh dramatizes brilliantly.

But it comes on quietly. The film is in black and white. Most of it takes place in and around a beautiful inherited traditional Japanese house in a peaceful neighborhood, where another old man's complaints about uncollected dog-do are the noisiest thing that happens - apparently. Gitsuke Watanabe (Kyôzô Nagatsuka), a distinguished retired professor of French literature and a widower, lives here alone. This is partly a closet drama where everything is contained in the retired sensei's house and maybe also in his mind. Nagatsuka is a pleasure to watch. Ditinctly aging (the character and the actor are both around eighty), he's nonetheless handsome, a tall, lean, healthy man almost with a spring in his step. He dresses informally but always elegantly. It might feel at first that he and his life are perfect, given his age, except that he is alone. This man's prestige and good looks and fine surroundings eventually only in a way highlight the indignities, danger, and confusion that await him.

In line with the lovely house and the elegant man, at first things seem in good order. Watanabe arranges to give a lecture somewhere and names his price as 100,000¥ (nearly $700), excluding travel expenses. He also is at work on an article for a magazine. But then he reveals that every month he runs out of money. And the magazine people visit and tell him since their publication's format has changed, its "cultural" section will shrink down with no room for his pieces.

It's a pleasure to watch the sensei prepare his meals with skill and consume them with quiet gusto. Is this just a film about how to live well as a single, elderly man? But an early warning sign is that the first meal we see is a whole fish he fries for breakfast. He varies the meals. One thing: he's not a vegetarian. There is regularly the satisfying sound of the hand grinder he uses each time he makes himself a cup of coffee. Maybe too often? He also enjoys wine with meals. Simple food, but the best ingredients. He's a bit of a gourmet.

Gradually we realize, well, various things. First that the beauty of the house does the sensei little good. He can't afford to maintain it properly. (A former student is working on the long non-functional well, gratis.) There's a clutter of stored things that causes him to trip and fall. Someone arrives, and he has forgotten they had a date.

The sensei goes too far when he buys several different kinds of kimchi and makes a salad meal of that that lands him in a health clinic. Later he returns for a second exam and is humiliated by a tube up the butt administered by a woman, the male doctor he saw before off duty. "Don't you trust me?" says the female doctor. "I'm very good." He has told someone he hasn't had a medical exam since his wife's illness. He'd rather not know. But the central pleasure of his meals is now fraught with danger, whether he recognizes it or not. He also drinks at a bar. He's told he can't go on living this way.

There is also the loneliness and the desire. When eventually we see the sensei's late wife (Asuka Kurosawa) she is beautiful and elegant - though she remiinds him that though he taught French literature for so many years he never took her to Paris. He admits he was not completely comfortable speaking French, but he sees he should have overlooked that. He has lunch with an elegant former woman student (Kumi Takeuchi) who edits a journal. They have a history they turn out to see differently: she thinks their late meals would be considered harrassment now, but he thinks she was happy to be learning so much.

It's more raw with the pretty, vibrant young woman at the bar he frequents who herself is studying French (Yumi Kawai), and turns out to be sharper than she shows at first. Though the only St. Exupéry she has read is Le Petit Prince, she has read other authors, and longs for the meals described in Proust - his specialty was always Molière and Racine. This film knows its French lit. The point is he fantasizes about these younger women, and this is where the fantasies begin, and the dreams. After a while they blur together.

There are also now thoughts of death, preparing for it by writing a will and planning absurd or improbable suicides. And we the viewers here lose control of reality. The mind is going, and paranoia is busily churning. When he isn't looking the sensei's big computer screen in his comfortable study suddenly fills with a busy jumble of crazy lines of text, which has been threatening for a while with the direst of treats of chaos. "Teki" means "enemy" in Japanese. Enemy coming in numbers from the north, the messages say. The sensei eventually stops being able to draw a clear line. But he has made a will, leaving the house to a trustworthy younger cousin. What will this man do, and what will become of him?

James Hadfield of The Japan Times (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2025/01/23/film/teki-cometh/) begins by saying this is "the latest in a procession of Japanese films about the plight of the elderly in a rapidly aging society." He is right. But it is so much more than that and tickles various genres with subtle skill, as its repeated references to dirctors like Hitchcock and Chabrol show us. This film is adapted from a book by Tsutsui Yasutaka, and I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it's as brilliant an adaptation as Lee Chang--dong's Burning (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4055) is of the Haruki Murakami short story that appeared in The New Yorker years before. A great film begins with a great screenplay.

Teki Cometh 敵 (teki, "Enemy"), 108 mins, premiered at Tokyo,winning best picture, best director, and best actor awards; it showed also at Taipei, Helsinki, Chicago (Asian Pop-Up Cinema), Hong Kong, Udine, and Jeonju. It was screened for this review as part of Japan Cuts.
SHOWTIME
MONDAY, JULY 14
Teki Cometh – 6 PM
A Samurai in Time – 8:30 PM

Chris Knipp

07-08-2025, 10:13 PM

"The Real You" is an adaptation of Keiichiro Hirano's 2021 novel of the same name. (本心). Directed by Yuya Ishii, who also wrote the screenplay, the film opens on a stormy night when 'Sakuya', played by Sosuke Ikematsu, witnesses his mother fall into a river before he too tumbles in, resulting in a year-long coma.

The film is thoroughly hashed over by Haylay Scanlon of Windows on Worlds (https://windowsonworlds.com/2025/07/08/the-real-you-%E6%9C%AC%E5%BF%83-yuya-ishii-2024/). it probes issues of honesty and identity through a near-future dystopian tale of AI "real avatars" where have nots acting vicariously for the haves get the worst jobs ever, rather ike being an Uber Eats delivery person, and there seem to be no other jobs because everything else is automated.

The filmmaking is only average, but the main actor has a certain feel of desperate authenticity, and director Ishii gets to work through the same ideas that philosophical novelist Keiichirō Hirano broaches in the adopted novel. Sometimes you feel like you're being lectured, or that the same few points are being worked over and over. Trimming down to remove the repetitions and focus the action could have made it half an hourshorter.

The title:
本心【ほんしん honshin】
[n] true feelings; real intention; original intention; one's heart
[n] one's right mind; one's senses; one's conscience

The Real You screens in New York July 11 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts.