Tada’s Do-It-All House (まほろ駅前多田便利軒, 2011)

The fictitious town of Mahoro in Kanagawa prefecture is one of those inbetween communities framing the edges of Metro Tokyo.  Not a major city center in itself and with most people commuting to jobs in Tokyo, there’s really not much of interest going on.  It doesn't even draw tourists as it’s too far from the sea and not in the mountains.  The people who live there don’t really have much ambition to leave, and if they do, they usually come drifting back. 

At least, that is how it seems to Keisuke Tada (Eita), who runs a benri-ya (do-it-all-house) near the train station.  He advertises himself as a jack-of-all-trades doing everything from babysitting a chihuahua to working as a handyman.  He’s handsome and seems intelligent, so it is a bit of a mystery as to why he is doing such low paying work instead of working for a company in Tokyo. 

Order from cdjapan:

Mahoroeki Maetada Benriken Standard Edition

This mystery is the main element that creates tension in the film and awakes our curiosity to learn more about him.  The mystery deepens one evening when, after finishing up a job spying on bus drivers for their suspicious boss, Tada discovers that the chihuahua he is babysitting has gone missing from his truck.  He finds the dog sitting on the lap of a guy who looks a bit down on his luck at the bus stop.  It turns out that this man, Haruhiko Gyoten (Ryuhei Matsuda), went to school together with Tada, and that Tada had been responsible for Gyoten seriously injuring himself on a table saw during shop class.

Gyoten uses this old injury to guilt Tada into letting him crash at his place for the night.  One night turns into several days, and before long Gyoten is a permanent fixture at the benri-ya tagging along on jobs as Tada’s semi-reluctant assistant.  Although he seems like a deadbeat, there are many clues that Gyoten too may have once had a regular job.  He chastises Tada for not marketing himself properly and wonders why Tada, who seemed to have a promising future in front of him, is stuck in a dead end business.

Both men also seem determined to stay on the fringes of life, but they keep getting pulled into sticky situations due to their natural desires to help others.  They are drawn into action by a young boy called Yura (Kota Yokoyama) whose mother (Manami Honjou) has hired them to pick him up from cram school.  They start to realize that Yura’s strange behaviour is more than just insolence but is hiding the fact that someone is using him and they decide to help him get out of his predicament.  This subplot is tied up with another subplot about a “Columbian” prostitute called Lulu (Reiko Kataoka) and her fellow prostitute and house mate Haishi (Anne Suzuki) and the dodgy men in their lives.

The film is adapted from Miuri Shion’s bestselling novel of the same name which won the Naoki Sanjugo Prize in 2006.  It starts out well, and the relationship between Tada and Gyoten evolves in an interesting way.  Both Eita and Matsuda are excellent actors and the mystery surrounding their circumstances generates interest in what little plot is retained in this adaptation.  Unfortunately, the film has trouble sustaining interest and has many moments that just don't make sense at all (yes it's great to rescue a prostitute from a stalker but throwing her onto a train without belongings/money/somewhere to go/telling her friend is a bit odd to say the least).  One could argue that the directionlessness of the plot mimics the directionlessness of the two main protagonists, but the there are just too many head-scratching moments that lessen one’s enjoyment of the film.  The film’s biggest flaws are the one-dimensional female characters who would be laughable if they weren’t so disturbing.   

Director Omori Tatsushi won international acclaim for his avant-garde directorial debut The Whispering of the Gods (2005). While Tada’s Do-It-All House shows that he is quite good at getting great performances out of his male actors, the film just suffers from a problem quite prevalent in contemporary Japanese films: weak editorial decisions.  With a few nips and tucks to the second half of the film, this could have been a great star vehicle of Eita and Matsuda.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

This film screened at Nippon Connection 2012:

Osaka Hamlet (大阪ハムレット, 2008)

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

- Polonius, Hamlet I,iii, 78-9

Polonius` words of farewell to his son Laertes in the first act of Hamlet sum up the moral message of director Fujirō Mitsuishi’s live action adaptation of Hiromi Morishita’s award-winning manga Osaka Hamlet.  The film intricately intertwines the coming of age stories of three brothers – Masashi, Yukio, and Hiroki Kubo beginning with the death of their deadbeat Dad.  Embarrassingly, their mother (Keiko Matsuzaka) does not appear to be in mourning at all and even more worryingly, their long lost Uncle Takanori (Ittoku Kishibe) moves into the house and tries to make himself useful.

There could not be three more unalike brothers than the Kubo boys.  The eldest, Masashi (Masahiro HIsano), is a quiet, bookish type who is inspired to boldly come out of his shell when falls head over heels for a beautiful, wayward older woman he meets by chance.  In order to get to know Yu-chan (Natsuki Kato) better, he poses as a college student and even humours her cringe-worthy father fixation.    

The middle brother, Yuki (Naoyuki Morita) is a thug who bullies others and seems to enjoy getting into violent scraps with other thugs.  When he hears that the geek of the school has called him “Hamlet” he is at first offended because another kid at the school has a hamster named "Hamlet".  Upon threatening the young man over the perceived insult, he learns about the play by Shakespeare and is actually interested enough to take his first book out from the library.  At first, he cannot comprehend the language in the play, and has another outburst when he discovers Hamlet’s unusual relationship with his mother.  The most interesting part of Yuki’s character development is how he comes to terms with Shakespeare’s text.  Another Shakespearean element to Yuki is his capacity for extreme violence which recalls some of Shakespeare’s bloodier plays (ie. Mercutio vs. Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet).

The youngest brother, Hiroki (Tomoya Otsuka), is coming to terms with the fact that he would rather be a girl.  His family is remarkably understanding – even the thug Yuki whom one could imagine harassing people for being different.  “Koki” sports an androgynous haircut and wears a pink T-shirt.  The one person he identifies with most is his Aunt Aki (Manami Honjo) who is in the hospital with cancer.  Aki is also a bit different and enjoys role play and dressing up in costumes.  Some of the more touching moments in the film come when Koki visits his aunt in the hospital.

Even Koki’s classmates are supportive of him being true to himself.  When they decide to put on a class production of Cinderella, they collectively decide that Koki would be the best to play the lead role and cast a girl in the role of the prince.  The climax of the film comes when the play is put on and poor Koki has to endure taunting from three bullies in the audience as well as bad behaviour from other parents.  This was the most uncomfortable scene in the film as the acting was over-the-top and extremely unlikely.  First of all, it is not unusual in Japanese culture for men to play female roles, and secondly, the dialogue was really unlikely.  It turned an otherwise decent film into a TV sitcom for a few scenes.

  

The storylines of each of the family members have one thing in common: role play.  Masahi is pretending to be older than he is and role playing the father Yu-chan never had, Yukio has carefully constructed a tough guy façade for himself, and young Hiro-kun is getting to live out his fantasy by playing Cinderella in his school play.  Even their uncle is playing at being a house husband, even though he himself is not sure he is able to fulfil that role in their family.  

The theme of role play and even the plot have much more in common with A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Hamlet.  Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Osaka Hamlet has three interlocking plots and is a kind of comedy of errors.  It’s a decent little drama with much of the credit for originality of plot going to the excellent mangaka Hiromi Morishita.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

I saw a special screening of this film hosted by Nippon Connection in Frankfurt.  It is also available on DVD:

Osaka Hamlet Deluxe Edition

Love Suicides (信, 2009)

When love goes sour it can bring out the worst in people.  Sounds and gestures which were once held dear transform into irritations for the heart gone cold.  Edmund Yeo’s Love Suicides (2009) tells the tale of a woman (Kimmy Kiew) who has been abandoned by her husband.  She and her daughter (Arika Lee) live a quiet, simple existence near a rice paddy field in rural Malaysia. 

The daughter takes pleasure in the few things she has to play with:  she diligently practices on her  woodwind recorder or plays with a red balloon that hangs limply on the string.  Brief letters marked airmail begin arriving from the husband which mysteriously suggest that he can hear every sound the girl and her mother make:

“Dear wife, don’t let the child play the flute.  It’s too noisy.  My heart aches.”

“Dear wife, don’t send the child to school wearing shoes. It’s too noisy.  My heart aches.”

“Dear wife, don’t let the child eat from the porcelain bowl.  It’s too noisy.  My heart aches.”

Although the woman and daughter appear to be completely alone, the woman follows her husband’s instructions to the letter.  The daughter says nothing, but her words and actions suggest a growing sense of anger and resentment.  In the excerpt below, the mother is force feeding the daughter because the little girl is not allowed to eat on her own from the porcelain bowl:

There are many ways to read this short tale – the film itself being an interpretation of the even darker short story of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata.  From my perspective, it is a tale of abuse.  The quietness of the film – the excerpt above features the word of dialogue, there is no music and only a few incidental sounds (the recorder, shoes on gravel, the waves on the shore) – intensifies the tension that builds in the film.  It is a tension that leaves unspoken the at worst physically violent and at best verbally abusive relationship that must have existed for this mother to unquestioningly follow out her husband’s cold written instructions.

Cinematographer Lesly Leon Lee (vimeo) has done an inspired job shooting the film in cool colours and dark shadows.  Each sequence is beautifully framed.  The profoundest shot for me was the one of the mother lying on a tangled web of a fishing net.  It is an eloquent metaphor for the situation she finds herself in.

The original short story is one of the many gems contained in the Kawabata The Palm-of-the-Hand Stories collection translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. Love Suicides premiered at the Festival Paris Cinéma 2009 and Yeo won Best Director for the film at the China Mobile Film Festival 2009 and the Doi Saket International Film Festival 2010.  The film was produced by Greenlight Pictures.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

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This is the second in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984).  A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda.  His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.

Edmund Yeo's official website

Edmund Yeo Filmography

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)

Fleeting Images (2008)

Love Suicides (2009)

kingyo (2009)

The White Flower (2010)

Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)

NOW (2010)

Inhalation (2010)

Exhalation (2010)