New York Asian Film Festival 2024 (July 12-22 FLC) REVIEWS

[Chris Knipp]

MASAKI OKADA AND JINSEI HAMURA IN GOLD BOY

SHUSUKE KANEKO: GOLD BOY (2023)

The bad kids

There is certainly a special queasy pleasure in immersing oneself imaginatively in unmitigated evil, people who just kill everyone they don't like (like Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley). It's even queasier when the wrongdoers are a trio of young teenagers. These kids are 13, for heaven's sake. (The actors are around that too; Kaneko deserves credit for how at ease they seem.) There's also an adult, Higashi (Masaki Okada) who they catch killing his in-laws by pushing them off a cliff and making it look like an accident. They happen to have been shooting a film by accident when they meant to do a snapshot and caught the double cliff murder in the background. They immediately approach Higashi with extortion in mind. He's not such an easy mark. Eventually Higashi and the kids join up, briefly. Several adults get poisoned - a favorite - using (spoiler alert) Okinawa holiday food treats. Be careful if someone offers you a drink, also.

Masaki Okada is a tall actor with a pallid beauty of visage that is given a sickly look here, and he is effective, but the memorable actor is Jinsei Hamura as the psychopathic Asahi Amuro, a boy who is so smart he won a math prize the year before, but he uses his intelligence and composure entirely to do harm now. Higashi is married to rich, spoiled Shizuka (Rena Matsui), whose aging parents own a huge company. It is they whom he pushes off the cliff. He immediately goes into a big grief act for onlookers and the cops, which succeeds. This may be a bit implausible as is much that follows, but it's all too absorbing for that to matter.

We enter a (for most of us) wholly unfamiliar world of violent teern crime, when while his doting mother (Haru Kuroki) is at work, 13-year-old Asahi (Hamura) is gets a visit from by his best bud Hiroshi (Youji Maede), accompanied by Hiroshi’s half-sister Natsuki (Anna Hoshino), who announces she has stabbed her abusive step-father. (As is the custom here a quick flashback spells this out/.) Netsuki thinks he is dead. Asahi shows where he's coming from when he calmly assures Netsuki and Hiroshi the cops can’t arrest her since she’s 14. Hiroshi threatens some uniformed schoolboys next just to get money for them to order some fast food. This is the world we are in.

This takes place on the island of Okinawa, which imposes its own rules starting with poverty, because it is considerably less well off than the Japanese mainland. But this lurid material, a condensation of a serial, comes from the Chinese iQiyi platform, pared down by writer Takehito Minato. It's an embarrassment of riches, if you like, of so much meanness and evil in a short time that it's nauseating. Only in this piece, if someone feels nauseated, they've probably been poisoned and are about to die.

Once again a film has been allowed to run a bit too long. But the extra time allows for a lot of final twists and turns, and after all, the original had 14 episodes.

In a review in The Japan Times, Mark Schilling describes Gold Boy as a "kids-versus-adult story" but points out that this time, our normal inclination to root for the kids is powerfully undermined - by the morally repellang nature of the kids. Schilling describes the film as "a gripping study of evil," and there's nothing to challenge in that - though it would be more gripping if it were less breathlessly plot-intensive and more plausible.

Gold Boyゴールド・ボーイ ("Golden Boy"), 128 min., Japanese theatrical release Mar. 8, 2024. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Friday Jul 19, 3:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Saturday Jul 20, 4:00pm
LOOK Cinemas W57