TEKI COMETH (Daihachi Yoshida 2024)
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KYOZO NAGAATSUKA IN TEKI COMETH
DAIHACHI YOSHIDA: TEKI COMETH 敵 (2024)
Gerontion
Recommeded by Nick Newman in The Film Stage's 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 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 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
THE REAL YOU 本心 (Yuya Ishii 2024)
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SOSUKE IKEMATSU, KOSHI MIZUKAMI IN THE REAL YOU
YUYA ISHII: THE REAL YOU 本心 (2024)
Bonding in a world dominated by AI
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 (Sosuke Ikematsu) witnesses his mother falling into a river and then falls in himself, resulting in a year-long coma. When he wakes up everything has grownn by leaps and bounds into a world Sakuya cannot recognize. The thught that this cruel, manipulative world bound by AI is very like the Japan of today is a chilling one.
The film is gone over in detail by Haylay Scanlon of Windows on Worlds. 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 only much worse, and there seem to be no other jobs because everything else is automated. The haves are far above, and AI magnifies the gap between classes. In this depiction a large part of the population goes undepicted, however.
The theme is human connection and the loss of it. An important feature of this world is that the dead, whether touchingl or creepily, are resurrected to function again in virtual space for their survivors to enjoy as Virtual Figures or VFs. Sakuya (Sosuke Ikematsu), the main character, wants back his lost mother (Yuko Tanaka) with whom he has lived all his life and who was his beat friend. But when she is brought back as a VF, he cannot quite bear it. He is the voice of authenticity, and another theme is that technology alienates us from reality and our true selves no matter how cleveraly it trues to mimic those things.
Sakuya invites his mother's best friend, the younger woman Ayaka (Ayaka Miyoshi), whom he did not know, in to live with him in his and his mother's old place, along the VF version of his mother. Through the creationn of VFs from multiple sources (to make them three-dimensional) another theme develops, that we don't realy know anybody because everybody has secrets or hidden facets. Sakuya has a friend and contemporary Kishitani (Koshi Mizukami) who comes and goes and chiefly seems to exist to add energy, which he does.
Toward the end a new character appears, a have, a celebrity, Iffy (Taiga Nakano), who is wheelchair-bound. He calls on Sakoya and adopts him, impressed by a video that's gone viral in which Sakuya has done something authentic and brave, rejecting money in favor of being decent.
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 - Akuya's early history of prostitution, for example - are being worked over and over. Trimming down to remove the repetitions and focus the action could have made it half an hour shorter.
The title may have rich implications in the original:
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, 122 mins., will be shown in New York July 11 as part of this year’s Japan Cuts, for which it was screened for this review.
Friday, July 11, 2025
6:00 pm
In-Person Event
with author and book signing
MICHIYUKI - VOICES OF TIME 道行き (Hiromichi Nakao 2024)
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HIROMICHI NAKAO: MICHIYUKI - VOICES OF TIME 道行き (2024)
Preserving the past and thinking about time in Japan
This is a wonderfully sui generis short feature film, a blend of fiction and reality, which reminded me of Jem Cohen and his memorably unique 2012 film Museum Hours, set in Vienna and revolving around a woman in a coma and her Ameican friend who comes to keep her company and befriends a tall, learned museum guard at the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its overflow of old masters. In the same way Hiromichi Nakao, like Jem Cohen, puts together his film from his own collected elements, for his own special ends. The effect is to give a taste of time and Japan you won't get on the tour.
Voices of Time was shot in Nara, pop. 367,353, which was Japan's capital in the 8th century. "People of Kyoto overspend on clothes, Osaka on food, and Nara on houses," an old man (Umemoto) tells Komai was a saying. Correspondingly, the grounding of this black and white film, shot in Nara, is houses, and one house in a neighborhood of elaborately conceived and interwoven old and partly dying houses, on streets free of vehicular traffic, silent in the evening because people are old, or absent. Komai is a young man who buys a house from an old man. It is full of stuff, but he has cleared away enough to work on the house, testing the foundation (wooden columns underneith) from 150 years ago when it was built. It is a traditional Japanese house. He plans to live here. Bout first he must work on the house.
Some people are living in traditional Japanese houses. Some young people, not many, are returning to live in such houses, usually not in urban areas. I found a Youtube channnel about a couple, a German man and a Japanese woman, who came after serval years of living in Germany to live in her grandmother's former house in Japan. It is an immaculate traditional house, with small but perfect very modern kitchen and bathroom and what seems like plenty of rooms. They show it to us and explain some of the main elements of such a house, especially the tatami-floored minmal rooms, the shoji screens, the entrance with the genkan barrier and agari kamachi step up to keep out dirt and the layers of exterior walls, the shoji and fusuma, that can be slid back ech day, to reveal the outside, while the futon is folded away, and a bedroom turned into a work room or living room. There is nothing about this process in Nakao's film, but he makes you feel the love of the traditional house and the wish to preserve it and live in it.
Komai talks to several old local men, and walks-and-talks with one. He talks to someone who unfolds a very old map to show Komai that the area where the house he has bought is located is substantially unchanged, the steets and water sourcing along the same lines. So Komai isn't just buying an old house; he is buying into the remnants of a social and geopolitical structure that goes back to the eighth century or so. Komai also talks to a woman responsible for the house next door, which may be two houses, and she says her daughters are not interested in moving there, and the whole thing must be torn down. But Komai offers to help her preserve and restore the property, and she thanks him and may be interested.
There are other strains in this film that serve to give it a more leisurely pace, a less obsessive dirve than, say, the YouTube couple. And while the YouTube couple are relentlessly, ingratiatingly, talking to us, Nakao's film lets us listen, and observe, and think. One strain is railroads and trains, and the camera rides along looking forward down the track. We learn from several old men that the best way to see a certain scenic valley is to take the train ride through it. Not by other means. We make a memorable tran ride with three men, two older and one younger, through this valley. Two of the men are friends, the others only acquaintances, and we sense this from how they salute on departing. There is also a discussion that brings out this: older people - and Japan famously has an aging population - reach a point when they stop driving, and when they do that, small local train lines, which therefore become worth preserving, become their way of travel even for something as simple as shopping for groceries. So aging people, and trains, a thing in rural Japan.
The other theme is of time itself. In Heian Japan or up to a certain point, in Japan temporal time was used as the system. This is a varying system, also known as the seasonal time system or temporal hour system, that divided the day into unequal intervals based on sunrise and sunset, unlike the modern fixed hour system, into six "toki" or "koku," with the length of each toki varying by season.
Here, we are in a wonderfully immaculate room full of old clocks and at one end in front of us is an old man repairing them. On the wall to the right is a very well behaved and attentive boy. I thought of French children; but this is a boy of the past, and this scene is from memory. The boy sits in a special child's chair. At times he goes up and listens to the man, who tells him stories about time and clocks, some of them probably very fanciful. What shall we make of the idea that before clocks Japanese people used cats to tell time, by their eyes, which change color by the time of day? But this is a clock that, when you dropped it, would not break, the old man says. The boy, in on the game, jokes about this.
These sequeces are memories of the old man, now a grandfather, who then was the boy listening attentively to his own grandfather, long gone. Like so much of this film, they are delicately conceived and require only our attentiveness, like the boy's. They dont explain or announce. They just are. For the attentive, curious, and patient, like the little boy who is now a grandfather, this is a fine little film, which creates its own memories and spaces, as Jem Cohen's do.
Michiyuki means a journey from one place to another. The term has two components: michi refers to a road as a space, and yuki means going, a continuous human movement during traveling. Together, michiyuki links three elements—human beings, space, and time—into a single unified concept.
The Next Generation competition, featuring emerging directors competing for the Obayashi Prize, thisyear includes Michiyuki – Voices of Time, See You Tomorrow, Promised Land, and So Beautiful, Wonderful and Lovely.
Michiyuki - Voices of Time 道行き("The road less traveled") 79 min., in Japanese with English subtitles. With Daichi Watanabe, Kanjuro Kiritake, Hiromichi Hosoma. Screened for this review as part of Japan Cuts, July 10-20, 2025.
SHOWTIME:
July 13
3 pm
MY SUNSHINE ぼくのお日さま. (Hiroshi Okuyama 2024)
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HIROSHI OKUYAMA: MY SUNSHINE ぼくのお日さま (2024)
A pair of young figure skaters who weren't
Hiroshi Okuyama's My Sunshine is so consciously stylish it subdues everything to its boxy format, desaturated color, stinginess with closeups, and moments of stillness or silence. So maybe it creeps up on you when young fun and competition and really a whole adult adult life are all wrecked by the homophobia of a girl who learns her skating coach is gay. What can you say? The Japanese are uneven in their acceptance, and this takes place in a small town atmosphere on the island of Hokkaido.
The restrained style subdues feeling too, not unusual for a Japanese setting; but there is sadness and some rage in it, though some reviewers seem at times to want to see only sweetness and wonder at how "Rarely has figure skating been shown as so pure, poetic and sensual" (as Clarence Tsui dedlares up front in his review). Yet this is true; you feel the joy of figure skating in scenes here. When they're happening, they take over, and the restrained styilishness doesn't matter.
"My Sunshine revolves around Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a stammering boy who is as awkward at sport as he is with his speech" (Tsui puts it). The stammer is bad. The awkwardness is overread by some reviewers though, I think. What's more true is that Takuya, who's a hockey goalie in winter and plays baseball in the summer, is looking for his dream sport. He gets injured playing the goalie and it really hurts. He finds that dream when on the hockey rink he sees Sakura (Kiara Takanashi), a girl his age, twirling around gracefully, and Arakawa (Sosuke Ikematsu), once a figure skating star, coaching her.
Arakawa sees Takuya's efforts to figure skate in his hockey skates, with frequent but determined falls, and starts to coach him, free, lending him a pair of real figure skates. It's only a quick step to coaching Takuya and Sakura together as a oaur with the conscious ambition of preparing them for competition. This is a wonderfully complicated situation. Arakawa sees himself in Tatsuya. He may see the son he may never have. It seems pure delight for Tatsuya. It all began with his adoration from afar for Sakura's skating, and now he's allowed to hold her hand and glide on the ice with her. While for Sakura it's a hard drive for a pushy mom, Takura has an indulgent father and is doing this out of pure enthusiasm. (Given that he masters these moves, it's wrong to think he was ever unathletic.)
The intended emotional highpoint of the film before the gradual decline is the montage-intense sequence at the frozen pond, a moment rather too gushy for such an otherwise restrained film, where Arakawa skates playfulllly along with Takuya and Sakura while music plays loud from Arakawa's Volvo station wagon and they just have fun and smile. Is Sakura also smiling? Then yes; but Kiara Takanashi, as directed here anyway, is a stony type, her failure to show enthusiasm for anything a forewarning of far worse to come.
We, the audience, know that Arakawa lives with a young guy, Igarishi, though we don't hear his name (Ryûya Wakaba), but he is not out to anybody at work. Then outdie a shopping mall Sakura sees Igarishi and Arakawa in the Volvo and their playfulness cannot be mistaken. Next we know after a shot showing the coach's hands-on coaching of Tatuya, Sakura has come into Arakawa's office and made her acusatory, envious little speech ending in the word "disgusting." We can assume she was jealous of this relationship between the coach and the boy from the start. After all, he's coaching Tatsuya for free. She no doubt wanted all the attention and thought to become a solo star.
Soon after Sakura's little homophobic speech things decline rapidly. No competitions, no partnering with Tatuya, and a return for him to hockey. Arakawa has no more coaching work here at all, and Igarishi has to stay so it's over between them. Pretty drastic.
You have to hand it to Okuyama for drawing this tragedy in as soft, muted colors as everything else. (It's been noted there is a bit too much of Debusy's "Clair de lune.") Arakawa and Tatsuya have an unplanned warm weather trip back to the lake, and throw a baseball back and forth. Coach tells the boy he's not bad, affirms that he is leaving and isn't coming back. What does the boy say to the girl when they meet on the road later on? What can he say? Sadly, his stammer is as bad as ever. But this is, in its arm's-length way, an understanding and affirmative portrait of this shy, persietent, enthusiastic boy in search of a passion. He will find it.
A very distinctive little film, with a tougher bite than you might expect. The director's debut won a number of awards and was in Japan Cuts 2019.
My Sunshine 『ぼくのお日さま』 (Boku No Ohisama), 100 mins., debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and at many other festivals including Sydney, Taipei, Melbourne, Toronto, and Busan. It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 10-20, 2025 Japan Cuts.
LICENSE TO LIVE ニンゲン合格 (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 1998)
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HIDETOSHI NISHIJIMA IN LICENSE TO LIVE
KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: LICENSE TO LIVE ニンゲン合格 (1998)]
Starman
In Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1998 License to Live, inspired by Sam Peckinpah's cult Western Ballad of Cable Hogue, a guy wakes up 24 years old after ten years in a coma. He starts a mini dude ranch with one found horse and a milk bar on property belonging to his father that has a fish farm. It's a hangout movie riffing off the early seventies Hollywood indie style. Obviously this is, as a blurb says, "a marked departure from Kurosawa’s V-Cinema and horror fare, constituting an early show of the filmmaker’s remarkable adaptability and versatile range" - departing from his famous horror films like Pulse and Cure. This is an offbeat, indie, art film, charming by its oddity but making no effort to woo a mainstream audience. It's tailor made for film freaks who haunt the back aisles of Scarecrow Video looking for something old that is new.
As Yutaka, Hidetoshi Nishijima, later of Drive My Car, in his first lead plays it for comedy and mime with a loose, floppy physicality, which he declares in his first moments by the balletic way he falls out of the hospital bed on awakening. Kurosawa is interested in Peckinpah, and also in a certain winsome sadness à la Fellini in La Strada, but understated in a Japanese way. Young, long-haired and handsome, Nishijima's Rip van Winckle reborn man could be catnip to women in the audience if he wasn't so goofy and weird. He's a little like Jeff Bridges in John Carpenter's 1984 Starman. He's a tabula rasa, from outer space in a way, a young man with the mind of a fourteen-year-old who doesn't know what has happened in the past decade, stopped school in junior high, and ignores the books and magazines he's given to catch up. (He goes to his jr. high renunion later. The joke is his classmates are as out of it as he is.)
There's no rebirth, no burgeoning ambition, no love story for Yutaka. He isn't much interested in anything. The world he wakes up to, the world he doesh't know, isn't one that he wants. He has bursts of energy, and runs, grabs people, and throws things at them: under the indifference there is some rage.
Yutaka is lakadaisical and without much enthusiasm or drive. He eventually winds up on land that formerly belonged to his father and adopts a small stray horse whose owner, when he appears, Fujimori pays off. There is a fish farm. It's a place, but not much of a place. Gradually Yutaka gets the idea of running a pony ranch - with the one small horse - combinned with a milk bar that also serves hot dogs and a fence he paints white. Now he seems content.
Yutaka's parents have separated and his sister has feuded with their mother. He finds his father with some difficulty and learns the latter has come from Europe and is shortly going to Africa in a sort of missionary role. He finds his mother too, and she is friendly. His sister involves a trip to a nightclub where she is a singer with bangs who perofrms walking around the tables.
But it's the unexpected spaces between these scenes that seem to matter most.
Interview with Kuroshi Kurosawa: "I directed License to Live with the intention, from the start,to completely draw my inspiration from The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Of course, the genre is different ... However, the structure is...a character arrives in a new place and he finds a way of attracting new characters close to where he now lives; people come, a community forms itself, it becomes like a 'station', a stop-over or a coaching inn if you like. But the main protagonist dies, and all that is left are that place and the people inhabiting it. In that sense, for me, License to Live and The Ballad of Cable Hogue are one and the same thing... I believe it is neither a failure nor a success. It’s an attempt, and at the end, it’s maybe simply life itself."
For a more detailed online discussion of this film see the one by Jeff Stafford on Cinema Sojourns .
License to Live ニンゲン合格 (Ningen Gokaku, "Passing human exam"), 109 min. Premiered at Tokyo Nov. 7, 1998, and was also included at Berlin, Toronto, and New York (NYFF). Screened today for this review as part of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa feature in Japan Cuts (July 10-20, 2025) in an archival 35mm Presentation—Introduction by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. SHOWTIME:
Thursday, July 17, 2025
9:30 pm
In-Person Event
SERPENT'S PATH (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2024)
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SLIMANE DAZI, DAMIEN BONNARD, KO SHIMASAKI IN SERPENT'S PATH
KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: SERPENT'S PATH (2024)
Relentless cruelty in response to horrific evil, in France
The film is interesting for being the director's remake, set in France, of his own 1998 film. It is rare that a director has the authority and funding (as well as the versatility and energy) to remake his own film. The 2025 JAPAN CUTS series also includes the 1998 original, allowing for us to compare the two versions. However the prolongued display of meanness and cruelty of this newer film tends to diminish one's enthusiasm for going over the original as well.
The underlying subject is one of the most evil behaviors known to man: child trafficking, chiefly for organ donation. The meandering action focuses largely on the French father of a brutally murdered and dismembered child and an extraordinarily cold blooded Japanese woman with training as a psychotherapist who accompanies and encourages him as he seeks retribution for the crime. One after another they capture and torture various individuals, eventually killing them. The corpses slowly mount up. A lot of this transpires in a large abandoned warehouse, where the victims' pitiful cries go unheard.
In his September 2024 Variety review, Guy Lodge points out this was the prolific Kurosawa's third feature to premiere in this same year. (One of the ways he is able to work so fast is by using his own familiar team and cast members he looks on as "friends," but in the switch to France, he was challenging himself.)
Lodge calls this self-remake "coldly compelling." He compares the Japanese director to Hitchcock, who also did remakes of his own work. Kurosawa, Lodge writes "is the kind of tireless genre craftsman who seems to approach every feature as a test of his own proficiency." And Serpent’s Path, he says, "a brisk, harsh and, yes, clinically professional update of his own 1998 thriller of the same title, passes said test without a moment’s strain."
Well, this may be true, and admirable enough if something "clinically professional" is what we are looking for. However, there are obvioius shortcomings in the tale Kurosawa is telling here, however good a self-remake it may be. There seems little progresson in the meandering brutality of the action. The randomness of it is undeerlined by the fact that the bereaved French father is largely at the mercy of the arbitrary manipulation of his chilly Japanese guide, who herself shifts aims on a dime with apparent randomness. It's hard not to feel manipulated ourselves as we watch. There is also the fact that the mastermind of the evil organization, Deborah, described as superior to everyone else and "charismatic," the person that Lola (Vimala Pons) declares herself unable to live up to, never appears, so its as if the real protagonist is missing.
But what Kurosaws is making here is basically not so much a crime film as a horror film, only with, for a Japanese dirctor, an exotic and sophisticated new western setting. There are good actors, notablly the main French ones, Matthieu Amalric, Greegoire Colin and Slimane Dazi (of Audiard's Un Prophète), as Laval, Guerin, and Christian, not to mention the strong presence of Damien Bonnard as Albert, the lumpish but emotionally riveting aggrieved father, and the memorably relentless and chillly Kô Shibasaki as Sayoko, his constant partner and goad. I won't soon forget seeing the durable Amalric and Colin subjected to abuse and humiliation, and the form it takes. Kurosawa undoubtedly achieves an edge here, even if this is a totally dislikable film.
Serpent's Path, 112 mins., opened in Japan Jun. 14, 2024. International premierre at San Sebastian Sept. 21. Screened for this review as part. of Japan Cuts (Jul. 10-20, 2025). SHOWTIME:
Thursday, July 17, 2025
6:00 pm with director Q&A
THE GESUIDOUZ (Kenichi Ugana 2024)
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LEO IMAMURA, NATSUKO, YUTAKA KYAN, AND ROCKO ZVENBERGEN IN THE GESUIDOUZ
KENICHI UGANA: THE GESUIDOUZ (2024)
TRAILER
Saga of a punk band in Japan
Christopher Guest, Cameron Crowe, and Aki Kaurismäki are mentioned as kindred spirits for the Kenichi Ugana of this film about a Japanese horror-themed punk group whose lead singer Hanako (Natsuko), who is 26 , is convinced she balongs to the 27 Club (picures of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobainm are always on her wall) and will die when this year of her life ends. She is counting down to her twenty-seventh birthday, when she thinks she and her band, the Gesuidouz, will be no more. Hence the pressure to come up with somehthing great and worthy of Glastonbury, the music festival she aspires to be invited to. Is this film worthy of you? Yes, if you love punk bands and horror (an inspiration of theirs) and quirky little films, it definitely is. The look is bright and charming, the energy of the cast is strong, and the music is a blast. Even though the little band saga movie is familiar by now, this is a fresh entry.
Things begin on a down note, as they must. Hanako's depression and creative block, the news from their manager (Yuya Endo) that their records aren't selling and their concert's aren't drawing an audience. They know this: we glimpse a concert where there are only one or two people in attendance. The manager suggests they go out into the country. Maybe they will find inspiration there. And they apparently do, receiving a house and support from a government program encouraging movement to the country--plus an old country woman with a big smile who is their hostess. She never understands their music, but she wants to help them make it. Also gifted to them is a Shiba Inu dog who talks, butonly to give advice, named after the king of silence, John Cage (a nice note). Yes, he talks: there is an element of magic realism and there is a cassette tape with arms and legs that also talks which the director has identified as a "creature puppet" and very "analog." In the background, there are real actors playing faithful young urban fans, even from the beginning, though we don't meet any.
A big strain here is the creative process. Hanaka is pushed by the manager to come up with a winning new song, and she has great difficulty doing this. Her way of making a song is to draw phrases on large sheets of Japanese paper with brush and sumi ink, in the traditional way, with very large characters vvery roughly drawn. She arranges these around the room. Somehow I think more could have been made of this business, but it is, nonetheless, wonderfully visual just as it is.
Siddhant Adlakha's Variety review (at Toronto Film Festival's "Midnight Madness"), Sept. 12, 2024. calls this a "sardonic genre comedy." He also says "North American midnight movie fans who frequent the likes of Montreal’s Fantasia Fest and Austin’s Fantastic Fest will find themselves represented both physically and spiritually." Icidentally, after the band becomes a hit, there are brief passages of tentimonials from US and at even greater length French Canadian fans. Adlakha says this film "would make a fitting double feature with Swedish young punk movie We Are the Best!. NIce idea, though Lukas Moodyson is a hard act follow. I also thought of Niccolò Falsetti's MZargini, from the 2023 Opan Roads Italian film series. The Gesuidouz's combination of wild, desperate spirit and good humor is it own special one.
The Gesuidoux ("Guest House" 94 min., premiered Sept. 5, 2024 at Toronto, appearing also at Sitges, Kaohsiung, Leeds, Hong Kong, Tokyo FILMeX, Jeonju, and Fantasy Filmfest in Germany. Screened for this review as part of the July 10-20, 2025. SHOWTIME:
July 11, 2025
9:00 pm
In-Person Event
SEE YOU TOMORROW ほなまた明日, (Saki Michimoto, 2024)
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RISA SHIGEMATSU, MAKOTO TANAKA, RYOTA MATSUDA, TAKURO AKIYAMA IN SEE YOU TOMORROW
SAKI MICHIMOTO: SEE YOU TOMORROW ほなまた明日 (2024)S
The destructive effect of a best student
This minimalist film, which draws attention with its starkness and focus, represents how an outstanding student in a photography program seems to overwhelm some of the others. Ironically since it's about people involved in photography the images are on the bright and colorless side. The filmmaker is only 27 but is carving out a place here with her succession of well-drawn scenes.
The central character is Nao (Makoto Tanaka), the outstanding member of a group advanced photography students at an Osaka art college who outstrips the others in both dedication and ability. Her focus is street photography and people, it seems. She is never without her Canon 35 mm. SLR film camera hanging from her neck, and develops the black and white photographs of people she finds on the street and persuades to pose for her there, though we see two young women march off proclaiming her "creepy."
The film doesn't delve into the subtleties of photography but it's made clear that the dedicated artist who excels over others isn't like them and doesn't ever quite have time for them. After a falling out with her mother and a period of couch surfing with classmatres, Nao is living with a male photography student, Yamada (Ryota Matsuda), for whom she says only that she may feel affection. Everyone seems to revolve around Nao, including a friendlier young woman called Sayo (Risa Shigematsu), a more chatty, sociable guy called Tada (Takuro Akiyama), and the uneasy, hyper sensitive Yamada. When she gets a fellowship to study in Berlin even their teacher (Ken Okouchi) is envious of her. Perhaps everyone but Nao is an artist manqué.
The students question and chide the teacher a little at times: this is contemporary Japan, not a world where "senseis" have absolute, unquestioned authority. But he can tell a student after sitting and looking at a group of her photos for a while, sijmply that she's better, but not there yet, and that is accepted--without any analysis or explanation of the photographs. One gets a sense that art school is not the real world, not that the real world is anecessarily any more fair.
The film returns to the group four years later at a time when Nao, who has settled in Berlin, returns to Tokyo for an exhibition of her now widely recognized work. None of the others went on to be creative photographers, and only work in the field in secondary roles. Did Nao's presence discourage them rather than inspire them? They find Yamada, but he hides and runs from them. He actually says Nao has caused him to behave this way. So again, she moved dramatically forward while hurting others.
This film reminded me of Emmanuel Bourdeau's 2006 French film Poison Friends, about university students who are all influenced by a charismatic deceiver who in the end only harms them. Bourdeau's film is more elaborate and more negative about its picture of influence. Michimoto actually seems to admire Nao. But both films show that influences at university can be dangerous.
See You Tomorrow ほなまた明日 (Hona Mata Ashita "I'll see you tomorrow"),99 mins., released in Japan in theaters and on the internet September 28, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 10-20 Japan Cuts. Showtime:
TUESDAY, JULY 15
6 PM What Should We Have Done?
8:30 PM See You Tomorrow
PROMISED LAND プロミスト・ランド Masashi Iijima 2924)
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RAIRU SUGITA, KANICHIRO IN PROMISED LAND
MASASHI IIJIMA: PROMISED LAND (2024)
Two young men carry on a forbidden bear hunt
Masashi Iijima's feature debut gives us solid, intractable materials. The heart of it is a bear hunt by two young men on a wooded montainside, most of the time not talking. The two are the 20-year-old Nobu (Nobuyuki, Rairu Sugita), whom we meet first, and Rei (i.e., Reijiro; Kanichiro), to whom he owes a debt for a blood transfusion when he was very small, though he thinks it's unfair to bring this up to make him come along. It serves its purpose again, thogh, because after cursing Rei,Nobu does accompany him on the hunt for which they risk imprisonment, indeed in Rei's case court it. The environmental agency has forbidden bear hunting in the region this year.
Rei argues the claim that the local hunting endangers the species is false, that it's the reverse, that culling them preserves them, as Peter Beard argued for elephants in Africa.
The prohibition emerges at the film's outset in a meeting of local men, the rest all older. It's 1983 and they are of the village of Hibara, amid the mountains of Yamagata Prefecture on Japan's Honshu Island in northern Japan where there remains a strong tradition of matagi or bear hunters from ancient times. So this prohibition is paintful, but the boss of the little circle tells them they must obey it, even if perhaps outsiders come to do it purely for sport. For them it's a tradition and a ritual deep in the culture to hunt bears when the snow begins to melt. And so Rei insists. He thinks they must continue the tradition or it will die. And so we follow them.
The two men seem to reverse after this event. Rei is a gardener who seems happy with traditional work, and cites a rich customer with a college education, unlike him, who hates working in a bank and thinks it's like prison. Nobu seems more modern, and is fed up with feeding the chickens on his father's poultry farm. But afterward Rei leaves, while Nobu decides to stay saying he will far better.
I thought of two movies for what may seem at first no clear reason: Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet (2011) (NYFF) and Werner Herzog's 2005 Grizzly Man.. Nobu and Rei are far from "Grizzly Man," and the traditional view they follow of a bear as a noble adversary, however disapproved of by many now, is more sensible than Timothy Treadwell's touchy-feeling falsification of dangerous nature. But many viewers of this film may adopt a Timothy Treadwell stance of outrage. The Loktev arises because this film too shows how men can be radically changed in the wild.
The sensuousness, the witholdding of Masahi's film suggest the Claire Denis of her L'Intrus". And that makes this a very promising beginning.
When the men meet in a circle on the floor drinking sake from cups and. their boss lays down the law, it looks at first like they're yakuza. I liked that. Viewers of this film either lilke or hate that much of it is on the mountain, without dialogue. The climactic part of the hunt is unexpected. It is Nobu rushing breathlessly up the mountain crying to force the bear toward Rei. You feel his growing exhaustion. When they killed the bear the two men prepare and acknowledgeit in the traditional ritual way,and they both appear happy. But then other members of the matagi arrive. . .
The editing of Promised Land by Shinichi Fushima, with occasional bladkouts, has a nice, even rhythm and preserves a sense of rawness and The score is admirably minimal. The film is an adaptation of the award-winning 1983 novel by Kazuichi Iijima.
Promised Land プロミスト・ランド ("Puromisuto Rando"), 89 min., premiered at Hawaii International Film Festival. It was released in Japan June 29, 2024. Screendd for this review as part of July 10-20,2025 Japan Cuts. Showtime:
Saturday, July 19, 2025
12:30 pm
In-Person Event
SHE TAUGHT ME SERENDIPITY (Akiko Ohku 2025)
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RIKU HAGIWARA, YUUMI KAWAI IN SHE TAUGHT ME SERENDIITY
AKIKO OHKU: SHE TAUGHT ME SERENDIPITY (2025)
Pining for love in Kyoto
Director Akiko Ohku's films on the young and lonely have a following in Japan, and this is the latest. (I previously reviewed the 2020 Hold Me Back 私をくいとめて(NYAFF 2020). This time the central character is a guy, college junior Konishi (Riku Hagiwara), who looks tall and rangy but itsn't handsome. This film is about his relation to two women, so this is't unlike the other films. But it does revolve around Konishi. Is this a rom-com? Sort of, for a while. But it's also maybe more than that about being odd and lonely and somehow overcoming that, and grieving. Konishi does some specatcular grieving. The Japanese hold back emotion, but when they let it out, wow. This film is a little bit strange, a little bit long, but has several monologues only the hard-hearted would resist.
Konishi is coming back to his Kyoto U. classes after a long abence; later we learn why he was gone. He has two friends there. The human one is Yamane (Kodai Kurosaki), a cheerful, wavy-haired guy who wears his own unique stylish looks. When Konishi doubts the reality of the girlfriend he talks about now having, this threatens to cause a rift. The other friend is Sakura, the university dog Konishi loves to hug. He has his protective eccentricity, walking with an umbrella open even on sunny days.
At a big lecture Konishi spots Sakurada (Yuumi Kawai), a loner girl with a big top knot, which turns out to be her protective eccentricity. He first connects by leaving class early and asking her to check out for him, as others have done. Then they chat, then they have breakfast at a quaint little spot three times. They go to an acquarium together and in its deep romantic azure glow they learn they've both been knocked for a loop by grieving. Later she reveals whe was a Hikkomori, an extreme recluse. But what is her feeling toward Konishi? She says their conneciton is "serendipitous," and refers him to the book that comes from. Anyway like him she has a parttime job. Hers is at a snack shop.
His job is cleaning a public bath after hours and his coworker is the petite, sprightly Sacchan (Aoi Ito), who's also a musician. They have good times, but so far only at work, and walking home afterward. From time to time Konishi talks to the bath boss Sasaki (gnarly veteran Arata Furuta, who adds flavor later on).
At the one-hour poiht of this two-hour film Konishi and Sacchan are walking home at night and, standing at a distance to say goodnight, Sacchan, who has learned vry well now about Konishi's new thing with Sakurada, delivers a stunninbg 8-minute-long speech of hitherto unexpressed and unrequited love for Konishi that turns the whole film around. It's no longer a light, quirky rom-com about young misfits who tentatively find each other but something a lot deeper and more, belatedly, articulate. This is the last we see of Sacchan.
But she is not by any means forgotten. In fact Sacchan looms over the whole second half, which seems to slow down, as Konishi's love life also begins to seem increasingly imaginar, or surreal. The length of this film in relation to the relative paucity of scenes and developments is an indication that it's a little awkward in shape, perhaps difficulty in adapting the transitions of the source novel by Shusuke Fukutoku. Nonetheless, besides its acknowledgment of the origin of the word "serendipity" in a book The Three Princes of Serendip, this film also deserves credit for taking youthful rom-com material to some deeper emotional places.
She Taught Me Serendipity 『今日の空が一番好き、とまだ言えない僕は』 ("I still cant say that I like todayi's sky the best"), 127 mins., premiered Tokyo Oct. 29, 2024 and received aVariety review by Rchard Kuipers and a review in The Japan Times review by Mark Schilling. Screened for this review as part ofJuly 10-20 Japan Cuts.
Showtme:
Saturday, July 12, 2025
6:30 pm
Akiko Ohku
SO BEAUTIFUL, WONDERFUL, AND LOVELY 『素敵すぎて素敵すぎて素敵すぎる』 (Begumi Okawara 2025)
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SHIN NAMURA, MEGUMI OKAWARA IN SO BEAUTIFUL, WONDERFUL AND LOVELY
MEGUMI OKAWARA: SO BEAUTIFUL, WONDERFUL AND LOVELY 素敵すぎて素敵すぎて素敵すぎる (2025)
TRAILER
Reconciliation to lost love
Megumi Okawara is writer, director, editor, and lead actress of this film, her feature directorial debut. It is a quirky, staccato, rapidly edited study of a woman, school cleaner Nozomi Haruta (Megumi Okawara) in the period of a month after she has learned that her partner, her beloved, her soulmate the young teacher Chitose Yokomizo (Shin Namura), has gone and married somebody else. In the opening sequence Nozomi suddenly appears when Yokomizo and his bride and are being photographed outside with the wedding guests. She pushes herself in between the bride and groom in the front of the picture, then grabs the camera and its tripod and runs off.
There is no realistic handling of this event or even the certainty that it actually happens. Yokomizo now appears to Magumi, only he is not Yokomizo but an apparition looking like Yokomizo who calls himself Castella, He is a Castella cake, or a deliverer of one--a popular and historic Japanese sponge cake introduced by the Portuguese in the 16th century, and he wears a piece of castella cake on the lapel of his otherwise crisp and impeccable suit. He will be around, he tells her, until the expiry date of the cake. And that is the time span of the film. At the end of the film, Nozumi will be seen in a vast suburban open space flying a large kite composed of many pieces of castella cake up in the sky in the shape of a giant brassiere. The long bridle of the kite is composed of a string of brassieres. There is a scene in which Nozumi tries on a beautiful, sexy brassiere in a shop called "Brassiere Unlimited."
But Nozumi also plans to take a new job in what appears to be a roadside statiohary shop. (Stationary shops seem to be flourishing in Japan.) The shop is high ceilinged but cluttered. Nozumi interviews for a job there. There's an older man in an overcoat who comes to the stationary shop every day and raises one finger up. That seemes to be asking if there is one new thing at the shop today, but opinions differ about what it means. By the end, staff have made a song whose video is composed of clips of the store CCTV camera showing the man who raised one finger coming in the shop on successive days. This becomes the theme song of the film.
There are also scenes at the school where Nozumi has been cleaner. Wherever she goes Castella appears too, but others do not see him. Nozumi talks about fantasy and dream, at one point seeing everything she wants to be real is a fantasy and everything she wants to be a dream is real. It is odd that the man Nozumi wants to get over with is her companionn as she strives to adjust to her despair over losing him.
This little film is a small phantasmagoria of ideas and scenes relating to it theme of disappointment and reconciliation, also veering off into its own outer space much of the time. I was reminded of Miranda July. The high concepts, like July, risk running tinto terminal tweeness, but when you see the brassiere kite made of castella cakes you know Okawara has flown off into her own space, and you have to respect people who have the courage of their absoutely weird convictions. Probably Michel Gondry would approve. I loved Shin Namura's enunciation, and his enthusiasm. This and Akiko Ohku's She Taught Me Serendipity , both in the 2025 NYC JAPAN CUTS, are contemporary examples of a variety of contemporary Japanese rom-com. This one is more out-there.
Reviewed in moere detail in Asian Movie Pulse
Beautiful, Wonderful and Lovely 素敵すぎて素敵すぎて素敵すぎる (Sutekisugite Sutekisugite Sutekisugiru, "Too nice, too nice") 67 mins., premiered at Osaka March 2025 where it received the Japan Cuts Award. Screened for this review as part of Jul. 10-20 Japan Cuts. Showtime:
With Director Q&A
July 19, 2025
In parson event
A SAMURAI IN TIME (Jun'ichi Yasuda 2023)
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MAKIA YAMAGCHI IN A SAMURAI IN TIME
JUN'ICHI YASUDA: A SAMURAI IN TIME (2023)
A samurai transported to modern day Japan becomes a film actor
The film is enthusiastically and knowledgably reviewed on my reviewer.com. The writer wound up staying awake till three a.m. to watch the dvd and was convinced it was probably the best film he would see all year. An overview for Japan Cuts says the film, directed by Jun'ichi Yasuda, is a comedic and heartfelt tribute to the jidaigeki genre (samurai period dramas). It stars Makiya Yamaguchi as the samurai, who ends up working in a movie studio, starring in jidaigeki films. The film is praised for its low-budget charm and the lead actor's performance.
All this is true. You have to make allowances at the outset for a time-travel fantasy, sort of the reverse of the idea in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Artur's Court. But thisdoesn'thave quite the charm and storytelling skill of Mark Twain. Makia Yamaguchi, who has a strong, sernsitive face you never tire of watching, plays the lead role of Shinzaemon Kosaka, who was a member of the Aizu clan in support of the Tokugawa Shogunate during the late Edo period in Japan. During a fight lightening strikes and transports him to the modern era, which he doesn't spot at first because he has landed in a place where they still make jidaiki films, though the historical fight genre is not in fashion anymore. Kosaka adjusts quickly to his situation. He knows his only skills are as a sword fighter, and his only living will be as a kiraeyaku– a costumed film extra who gets slashed in jidaigeki productions like those of the nerdy but soulful script supervisor Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who takes him under her wing. And then things go on and on with. series of short episodes that introduce various other characters, mostly fellow kiraeyaku.
This was a big hit at Japan Cuts (in Japan) it's reorted, the biggest Japanese indie phenomenon since One Cut of the Dead. This low budget film financed entirely by director Junichi Yasuda, it's said was initially shown in only one Japanese theater, but through word-of-mouth grew into a nationwide sensationn, ultimately taking home Best Film at this year’s Japan Academy Film awards.
The film is not just a comedy, but also a love letter to the jidaigeki genre, which though its popularity was far off in the mid-20th century, has too romanitic a place in Japanese culture ever to be forgotten It explores the legacy of samurai culture in Japan and the challenges faced by the genre in contemporary cinema. Perhaps it will lead to some mavericks making authentic samurai films again.
A Samurai in Time 『侍タイムスリッパー (Samurai Taimusurippa, "Samurai time slippers"), 131 mins., premiered at Koto Oct. 14, 2023, also Montreal (Fantasia) Jul. 28, 2024, Fight Fest (UK) Jul. 24, 2024, many Australian and UK fests, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and others. It was screened for this review as part of Japan Cuts 2025.
CLOUD (Kiyoshi Kurosawa 2024)
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KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: CLOUD (2024)
Exposé of criminal online sales unfortunately degenerates into a shootout
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud begins as a techno-thriller exploring the reprehensible side of online product reselling and its moral and physical consequences. The film follows Ryosuke Yoshi (Masaki Suda)i, a seemingly innocent young man who energetically and adeptly makes money by buying products wholesale and reselling them individually online. He finds that he can sell products rapidly this way even when sometimes his markup is outrageous - say, from 10,000¥ up to 100,000¥ ($67 to $675).
As we watch dozens of images of the same product with its price on an internet screen quickly switching to "SOLD", with Yoshii glancing sideways at the event as if he well knows he's getting away with something, it may not be too much to say there is a creeping feeling of an invasion of something vaguely improper and dangerous going on, a kind of thrill of the grifter successfully at work. This is when the film is at its strongest and the viewer is fullest of attention and expectation. There are only hints of the resentment this methodology may be engendering in the public, but they are enough to , and will silently and invisibly bloom.
Things go south when Cloud shifts from soft crime film to revenge action and then to Western style shootout in its latter half. Kurosawa never stops producing a smooth, effective entertainment, but the specificity, topicality, and good sense of this film have slipped away.
It's understood that as Yoshii's practices increasingly attract customer resentment and a desire to uncover his identity and seek revenge. See David Hudson's essay for Criterion on Kiyoshi Kurosawi's "biggest year" and Cloud.
But also see Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian for April 21, 2025. Awarding the film only a miserable two out of five stars, Bradshaw says it's another illustration of the fact that "movies about internet crime can so easily unravel into implausible silliness." Some of Kurosawa's details are questionable, says Bradshaw, such as Yoshii's selling a brnkrupted company's therapy devices: why wouldn't the company itself sell them? Some items are legitimate. However some are not, notably fake designer bags sold at a whopping price as genuine. (Again, Yoshii seems to find you can sell anything online for a good price, whether authentic or fake.)
Bradshaw complains that "all the hi-tech detail and low-key everyday believability of the story" are eventually "jettisoned" in favor of the final "entirely ridiculous shootout in a deserted factory" (a very standard trope, by the way), accompanied by "many deafening bullet ricochets off metal fittings." Bradshaw with justification describes the concluding half hour as a "neo-western style melee which seems to go on forever." It does go on interestingly sometimes - I liked the confusing way Yoshii's assistant Sano (Daiken Okudaira) comes and goes, for instance; but the fact remains t hat the focus on online crime in reselling goods gets very largely lost in the action, and certainly the specificc details of Yoshii's malfeisances do.
Ghost, 124 mins., premiered at Venice Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at Toronto Sept. 5. 2024, Busan Oct. 3, 2024, Los Angeles (Beyond Fest) Oct. 9, 2024; several dozen other internatonal festivals. Limited US theatrical release Jul. 18, 2025. Scfeened for this review as part of Jul. 10-20, 2025 Japan Cuts. SHOWTIME:
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
6:00 pm
In-Person Event
LOVE LETTER (Shunji Isai 1995)
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SHUNJI IWAI: LOVE LETTER (1995)
Love and loss and having the same name
Love Letter, which is from thirty years ago, hasn't really dated any more than it was when it came out. It is a swoony delight, without actually having much swooning. It does have a granddad who wants to carry his child on his back to the hospital in a snowstorm. The main couple are not both admitting they are a couple. The central trope is doomed doubling: the pairing of two people of opposite sexes who have the same name, Fujii Itsuki, and one, the guy, dies tragically younng in a climbing accident.
It's nice to have a story where the "love letter" actually is a letter, of the old kind, in fact an exchange of them, some typed and the others handwritten. It starts when Hiroko Watanabe (Miho Nakayama), who lives in Kobe, decides at the two-year anniversary of his death in a climnbing accident to write a letter to her deceased fiancé Itsuki Fujii, using an old addrtess of his that she finds. Imagine her surprise when she gets an answer. Her letter has reached a female librarian with the same name, Itsuki Fujii, of whom the same-name Itsuki, Hiroko's Itsuki, this Itsuki also has memories because they were in schoiol together and for three years in the same class, much to the she-Itsuki's distress, because they were endlessly teased by the other students for their identical names.
Far fetched, you may say. But young people only waht a shared conceit as a fresh framework on which to hang thoughts about youth, memory, loss, and love. Shared letters uncover memories from school of the lost Itsuki.
Framed within the back-and-forth correspondence of heartbroken Hiroko and librarian Itsuki—a widowed fiancée and the former classmate of her deceased lover (Miho Nakayama in dual roles)—Love Letter focuses on buried recollections as their letters uncover Itsuki’s school-age memories of Hiroko’s dead fiancé. The "soft-focus lyricism" has been slightly exaggerated. Some of these are memories of junior high school, after all. But we have to believe them when they say, with experience, that Iwai's breakthrough captured the hearts of a generation and "the late Miho Nakayama’s eternal mountainside cry 'O genki desu ka?'
The feature film debut of the 1990s auteur Shunji Iwa, some get to revisit it and the rest of us to experience it for the first time.
Love Letter, 117 min., Toronto Sept. 8, 1995. Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Japan Cuts series July 10-20, 2025.Showtime:
Saturday, July 19, 2025
6:30 pm
In-Person Event
KAIJU GUY! (Junichiro Yagi 2024)
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GUMPY IN KAIJU GUY!
JUNICHIRO YAGI: KAIJU GUY! (2024)
Chubby fanboy bureaucrat gets to make a monster movie to promote his town
This is a kind of underdog film that celebrates DIY filmmaking along with the Japanese popular monster movie tradition almost everyone knows. A "kaiju movie" is a monster movie.
We first visit this film's protagonist, chubby, bespectacled Ichiro Yamada as a youth, when his dream was to make a Japanese kaiju or monster movie. The job doesn't quite come off. His classmates greet the youth's film with riotous laughter - not what he had wanted, crushing the dream. But this is the story of his second chance as a grownup and a civic employee, member of the Seki City tourism bureau. The tight-assed lady mayor proposes a PR film, but as the descendant of many generations of mayors whose motto was Don't Change, she wants something ordinary and conventional. The trouble is, though, Yamada and his colleagues have already promoted the local seafood and traditional sword-forging artisans to death, and they really need someting new and fresh. The role of Yamada as an adult is played in his movie debut by Gumpy (aka Gunpi) a huge, and hugely popular, Japanese comedian (part of a duo) who already has 1.5 million YouTube followers.
This is the story of how Yamada gets to blow things up, film his very ample body in jockey shorts looming huge over the city, and roar amd spew fake fire in his own film introdcing enthusiastic brief endorcements from most of the town's main businesses - and the whole town loves the result. There is a DIY spirit about his team's effort that is endearing to them, and to us.
At first the prissy municipal accountant lady Yoshida (Yuka Sugai) is in charge of production for the town film, in cooperation with the department head, Chosuke Muto and his grouchy deputy Fuko Furukawa. Then while editing on her own, Yoshida accidentally deletes the entire film - and it turns out there weren't enough funds allocated for backup. It's up to Yamada to come up with something fast. Needless to day, he delivers.
He has a strategy. As a kauju movie fan, he knows that the revered genre filmmaker Eiji Honda (Akaji Maro, in a nod to Gojira, or Godzilla, director Ishiro Honda) maintains a warehouse full of his old kaiju props right in town. And when Honda learns that Yamada is desperate after the footage is all lost, he agrees to lend a hand, and a vintage monster bodysuit.
Because of Yamada's enthsiasm and the desperate deadline everyone in the department bows to the kaiju theme, and it turns out that a lot of the locals think were already thinking this is a great idea for a promotional film.
This is a charming, quiet study of local bureaucratic pressue, Japanese style, and of the survival of fanboy enthusiasm for a Japanese tradition everyone knows, of the monster movie, which is accessible to amateurism because it was always low-fi. When the movie gets made and the town greets it with an ovation, Yamada's old sensei (Yoji Tanaka), luckily, is present to nod his approval. The filmmakers boldly show us the film that Yamada and company have produced, too, and it has the same kind of informal charm as the rest of the film as a whole. This is a Japanese film that is very local - it pokes fun at Japanese deference and fear of authority y- et quite accessible and entertaining to westerners.
Kaiju Guy! 怪獣ヤロウ! ("Kaijū Yarō!"), 80 mins., released Jan. 31, 2025 in Japan, is distributed by Nikkatsu, the venerable Japanese studio which is representing Kiyoshi Kurosawa's newest film Cloud. The film was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 10-20, 2025 Japan Cuts series, where it showed on July 20, 2025.
