Showa
Fujishima has made just about every parenting mistake a father can make and
invented some that are uniquely his own. Not surprisingly, he really hasn’t
been around much to see the results. At least that allows him to cling to a few
willful misconceptions regarding Kanako. However, when his estranged ex-wife begrudgingly
requests the ex-cop’s help finding their missing daughter, he learns far more
than he bargained for in Tetsuya Nakashima’s The World of Kanako (trailer here), which screens
during the 2015 edition of Film Comment Selects.
Prepare
to have your head messed with. Nakashima will fracture his timeline nearly
beyond recognition and do his best to represent Fujishima’s warped perspective.
The former copper now working as a rent-a-cop always had anger management issues,
which directly led to his personal and professional disgrace. He is supposed to
take drugs for his temper and mood swings, but they do not seem to be working,
even though they might somewhat skew his perception of reality.
Kanako
has already been missing for five days before Fujishima’s ex finally asks for
his help. Intuitively, he assumes her disappearance is linked to the punky gang
kids she has been hanging with, which is largely correct, but his presupposition
that Kanako is an innocent victim will be rudely disabused. He soon learns she
is up to her neck in drugs and pimping out classmates to well-heeled
pedophiles. She was also apparently somehow mixed up in the suicide of her
classmate Ogata. We will learn just exactly how so in flashbacks seen through
the eyes of Boku, a secondary POV character, whose experiences with Kanako will
parallel those of poor Ogata.
Meanwhile,
Fujishima’s hostile former colleagues are more than happy to treat him as a
suspect in a gangland-style killing perpetrated at the minimart he was
ostensibly guarding. It turns out Kanako’s world is a small world when links turn up suggesting a connection
between the convenience store massacre and her disappearance. Fujishima is in
for a lot of pain and humiliation, but he will deal out plenty more to anyone
he considers a potential suspect or accomplice.
Man,
Kanako is dark, even by the standard
Nakashima set in his previous films, Confessions
and Memories of Matsuko. However,
unlike the seamlessly constructed escalation of Confessions, WoK is a bit of a rat’s nest, compulsively flashing
forward and backwards and liberally tossing unreliable perceptions or downright
hallucinations to the point where many viewers will just drop the narrative
thread and stop caring altogether, despite the occasional tongue-in-cheek
hat-tips to 1970s exploitation cinema. The form of the film is enough to give
you a headache, separate and apart from the rampant cruelty it depicts. Based
on Akio Fukamachi’s novel, WoK is a
nihilistic indictment of just about everything—that’s nihilism spelled with a
capital “F” and a capital “U.”
To
his credit, Kôji Yakusho doubles down over and over again as the violently
erratic Fujishima. It is a messy, let-it-all-hang-out performance, but Yakusho
takes it to such dark places, it is ultimately rather soul-scarring. Nana
Komatsu is ethereally evil as the deceptively innocent looking Kanako, while
Satoshi Tsumabuki chews the scenery with swaggering glee as Det. Asai, the
sucker-sucking cop who apparently thinks he’s Kojack. Ai Hashimoto manages to
add a thimble full of humanity to the film as Kanako’s estranged and disgusted
middle school friend Morishita, but such figures of decency are few and far
between in Kanako’s world. Frankly, it is hard to fully judge Kanako’s former
homeroom teacher, Rie Higashi, but (Matsuko
star) Miki Nakatani’s performance is truly riveting and maybe even
redemptive.
If
this is what life is really like for Japanese middle and high school students,
I would immigrate if I were a parent. It is hard to imagine a more exhausting
film than WoK, for reasons of both
style and content. It is clearly the work of a genuine auteur, who does not get
his just international due, but Nakashima really demands a great deal of
indulgence this time around. Lacking the tightness of Confessions and the pure gut-wrenching emotional payoff of Matsuko, it just starts to feel like it
is piling it on after a while. For those who enjoyed cult hits like Confessions, Lady Snowblood, Audition, and the real Oldboy, but found them too artificially
optimistic, WoK will give you the
straight shot of bile you crave. Recommended accordingly for ardent Nakashima
admirers, The World of Kanako screens
this Thursday (3/5), at the Walter Reade Theater, concluding this year’s Film
Comment Selects.
