JAPAN CUTS July 10- 21, 2023. REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

TSUKAO OGA IN SHADOW OF FIRE

SHINYA TSUKAMOTO: SHADOW OF FIRE (2023)

Searing drama of a ravaged post-war Japan

A Letterboxd sage suggests in this movie Tukamoto wanted to make (Elem Limoov's recently revived 1985 tour de force) Come and See, but with a smaller boy. True, this also is a view of the horrors of WWII, with a smaller boy, but there are fewer incidents, by far. The incidents however, except for what seems like some saccharine moments, are powerful and vivid and cut like a knife. The main setting is the black market district in a nameless, Japanese town immediately after the war, and things are very bad, and people are broken. The boy (Tsukao Oga) is an orphan. He sees and has seen and feels and has felt terrible things. He has nightmares. But his eyes are bright and his skin is clear. Not so the others.

At first the boy enters the remains of a tavern where a young woman (Shuri) who, run by a brutal pimp (Go Riju), serves as a prostitute for men who come at night. She takes him in. She also tries to take in an emaciated soldier (Hiroki Kono), pitiful but sweet.

Japan lost the war. That grim truth is embodied in everything, but most of all this soldier, who is badly shell-shocked. How he reacts when there is a loud noise is not something you want to see. He carries a "Second Grade Algebra" reader as a talisman: he was a teacher before the war and he would like to be one again. It doesn't appear he is in any shape to do that. But for a few moments there is this little, sad, faux family, a shred of hope so paltry it seems even more hopeless.

This world is grim, sepulchral, and yet it has a kind of beauty in extremis, like a Samuel Becket play, of finding truth when nothing more can be said. And these tavern scenes are largely like a play. The young prostitute takes the boy to her breast. She offers to see customers only in the daytime, so they can all sleep at night. The ravaged soldier also has said this is the best sleep he has had in a long time. She begs the boy to promise always to be with her.

But that cannot be. The young prostitute turns against the boy, because he has to hustle on the street. He comes back bloody: a mean bigger boy has attacked him to take away money he has earned or things he has stolen. She can't stand that. Her heart is shrunken and warped.

What follows is more like a short story. The boy joins up with what Mark Shilling in his Japan Times review calls "a sketchy black-market hustler" (Mirai Moriyama). This slick gown-garbed man with ponytail is another false family for the boy. But what the boy becomes part of briefly is like an episode in Klimov's Come and See, because he is drawn into a revenge, a dangerous event he cannot escape. The hustler was a soldier and the older man he is after was his superior officer who led him and others into terrible mistreatment of prisoners. He uses the boy as a messenger and also for the pistol he has found in a man's hand and carries in his bag.

There is of course a Message in this revenge, when the hustler explains why he's doing it. But Tsukamoto's screenplay convincingly embeds message in action. All that happens in Shadow of Fire is so intense and brutal we're just happy to get on to the next thing. And then we realize that's what the boy would do. And so he becomes a hustler in the market, and survives. However damaged he may be, here everyone else around him is more so.

Another comparison that may occur, which itself came immediately after the War, is with the great films of Italian Neorealism, Rossellini, Vicconti, Zavatini, De Sica. Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves are tearjerkers and have small boys in them. But Tsukamoto adds a psychological brutality that is outside the Neorealist range. Shilling points out the boy actor Tsukao Oga is "reminiscent of Yuya Yagira’s turn as an abandoned child in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2004 masterpiece, Nobody Knows, and indeed I was reminded of that film. It goes for its emotions faster than the Kore-eda, though, does not have that kind of slow accumulaiton of feeling that hits you as you walk out of the theater. But it's still good, and carries out its powerful work with elegance and economy.

This film has obvious links with Tsukamoto's 2014 Fires on the Plain and 2018 Killing, which premiered in competition in Venice. Also reviewed by Wendy Ide (in Tokyo) for Screen Daily.

Shadow of Fire ほかげ, 95 mins., debuted in the Orizzonti section at Venice Sept. 5, 2023; also Toronto, Tokyo, Taipei. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 New York Japan Cuts series (July 10-21), where it was scheduled as the Centerpiece Film.