JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL 2020 FILM HIGHLIGHTS

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The Japanese Film Festival is back for its 24th year in 2020 with this virtual edition streaming online from December 4 to 13, 2020.

www.japanesefilmfestival.net. 

The following three Japanese films are mostly complex and brooding in its drama, with varying levels of lightness and darkness. They are akin to a Japanese meal, a little sweet and then salty-sour until you get hit by the wasabi. They are films with umami, a taste that is both savoury and delicious, as they explore different facets of Japanese life. Enjoy them and relish their lengths (from 123 to 196 minutes) giving them time for their flavours to immerse into your feeding psyche.

ONE NIGHT
Length: 123 minutes

From director Kazuya Shiraishi, ONE NIGHT is often brutal and quite harrowing in its portrayal of a dysfunctional Japanese family destroyed by both domestic violence and abuse and eventual mariticide murder. It starts with a flashback on one rainy evening when Koharu (Tanaka Yuko) murders her husband who has been cruelly and physically abusing his children. She turns herself to the police and thus begins the story of what her three kids have become.

Timorous Daiki (Suzuki Ryohei) still stutters and is not coping as a husband and father. Yuji (Satoh Takeru) dreamt of being a writer but now struggles at a small-time paper in Tokyo. Sonoko (Matsuoka Mayu) wanted to become a hairstylist but now works as a call-girl.

It is a film of disappointments and failures, the siblings a product of a damaged upbringing. The characters are not only scarred for life, but they are also still living that circle of violence passed on by their dead father. Harsh and traumatising as it may seem, the film ends with a cathartic denouement, with a finale finely performed by the main cast.

0.5 MM
Length: 196 minutes

The longest of the three films is from Momoko Ando, who adapted 0.5MM from his novel of the same title. It has a very absorbing opening, with a scene featuring the lead Sawa Yamagishi (Sakura Ando, the sister of the filmmaker) as a carer who gets into trouble with her geriatric patient Kataoka (Junkichi Orimoto) and his daughter Yukiko (Midori Kiuchi). The execution of this opening scene is pristine, with the situations and circumstances getting dire and troublesome by the hour, leading into suicide and the burning of a house. This is the type of opening that will get you hooked for the next three or more hours.

The film is episodic and the segments are uneven in length, with varying genre styles, from dark comedy to even darker drama, all twisted in their motivations and intentions. It is also a film about the senses, as it delves into food and sexual longing, with Sawa playing the role of wife and mother to the elderly men she meets.

In its entirety, ageing and displacement are the central themes of the film as the men in Sawa’s life suffer from maladjustment in Japanese society. Notable performances are from the elderly retiree Yasuo (Tatsuo Inoue), comedian Toshio Sakata as an irritable auto mechanic, and Makabe (Masahiko Tsugawa), a professor suffering from late-life crises. And of course, the star of the film is Sakura Ando as she playfully performs the role of Sawa with deadpan impersonality and sinister kindness.

A STORY OF YONOSUKE
Length: 160 minutes

Possibly the lightest of the three films is a bittersweet youthful romance centred on a very naive and impressionable male lead. From the outset, Yonosuke Yokomichi (Kengo Kora) comes across as provincial and awkward, coming from a small town in Nagasaki to study at Hosei University in Tokyo. Helmed by Shuichi Okita’s from Shuichi Yoshida’s novel, the time is 1987 and Hosei University is the novelist’s actual alma mater.

Yonosuke’s friendly and amiable nature endears himself to his peers, including two fellow first-year students – the impulsive Ippei (Sosuke Ikematsu) and the charming Yui (Aki Asakura). Yonosuke also befriends the very chill fellow student Kato (Go Ayano), and through him meets Shoko (Yuriko Yoshitaka), an heir of an affluent family. There are other teenage characters, including unorthodox student Kuramochi and wannabe actress Chiharu. There is that budding conflicted romance with Shoko who visits him at his parents’ house in Nagasaki.

The story is quite meandering but at the same time experiential as you live through 80’s Tokyo from Yonosuke’s small-town Nagasaki vantage point. It has awkwardness, sentimentality, peppered with light youth-inspired romantic moments. A STORY OF YONOSUKE is warm-hearted and quite an immersion into the headspace of Japanese youth both in the 80’s and possibly still at present.