kingyo (2009)

The young female protagonist of kingyo (2009) is dressed in a maid’s costume and wanders the streets of Akihaba offering maid tours of the district for ¥10,000.  Business is going slowly except for an odd request by a creeper, but then the woman (Luchino Fujisaki aka Rukino Fujisaki) encounters her former university professor (Takao Kawaguchi) who pays for a tour in order to enjoy an hour of her company.

Sensei looks tired and haggard and we soon learn that the pair were once lovers.  When the woman broke it off, she gave sensei the parting gift of a pair of goldfish which he took home and gave to his wife (Amane Kudo).  Affairs, even when both participants are single, more often than not create an emotional mess when they go sour but when a spouse is cheating it adds the pain of deceit and disloyalty into the mix.   Visual cues suggest that sensei loved both his wife and his lover and is torn apart by the fact that in caring for the beautiful goldfish his now recently deceased wife was unwittingly nourishing his memories of his former lover.  The man’s dilemma is eloquently expressed not only in the face of the talented performance artist Takao Kawaguchi playing the sensei, but also in director Edmund Yeo’s innovative use of the split screen technique. 

Split screen is a technique that goes back a long way in cinema history, but in my opinion it has not yet reached its dramatic potential.  It has been used for comic effect – as in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic comedy Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) and these days is often used to liven up music videos or concert footage.  A number of directors have used it successfully for dramatic effect such as Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments (2007).  Yeo’s use of the split screen is similar to that used by Roger Avary in The Rules of Attraction (2002): showing two actions that are happening simultaneously.    It works both to build tension (such as the parallel actions of the sensei and the student in Akihabara) and to add atmosphere to scenes (two shots of same scene: the wind blowing the curtains gently as the wife observes the goldfish in their bowl. It also adds suggestive story information as in the brief split screen of the wife and the lover.

The most difficult section to shoot and edit must have been the dialogue between sensei and the student during his “tour” of Akihabara.  Yeo used a two camera set-up and it all looks very minimalistic and graceful, but having worked on film shoots in Toronto, I imagine it must have been technically very challenging to get the lighting and camera positioning right.

Like Love Suicides (2009), kingyo is another adaptation of a short story by Yasunari Kawabata.  The original story “Canary” (1924) featured canaries instead of goldfish.  Yeo informed me that he thought goldfish were more Japanese than canaries, and they certainly look stunning in close-ups.  The choice of fish reminded me of Kuniko Mukoda’s short story “Mr. Carp” which involves a former mistress giving her married lover a koi fish.  If I remember correctly, the starring fish evokes feelings of guilt on the part of the man.   

It  is a beautifully shot and edited film.  Yeo has a delicate touch when it comes to creating atmosphere in his films.  I was particularly taken with the actors’ performances – particularly Kawaguchi who has an extraordinarily expressive face.  kingyo made the short list for best short film at Venice in 2009 and won awards at the Larissa Mediterranean Festival of New Filmmakers and the Eibunren Awards 2009.

------------------

This is the third 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 Filmography (homepage)

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)

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