NYAFF ’19: Dare to Stop Us

Generally speaking, if you want to understand a nation’s collective angst, you check out its monster movies. In Japan, that arguably extended to their naughty Pinku Eiga films. Several prominent directors initially cut their teeth in Japan’s blue movie trade, but none was as notorious as Koji Wakamatsu. The auteur and his circle of collaborators and barely paid employees get a relatively evenhanded treatment in Kazuya Shiraishi’s Dare to Stop Us, which screens during the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival.

Wakamatsu was a former real deal yakuza, who became a close ally of the United Red Amy terrorist group, whose exploits he later chronicled in the surprisingly unflattering United Red Army. He was also an arrogant blowhard and a terrible boss. Yet, he could inspire loyalty in his crew and admirers, especially long-suffering assistant director, Megumi Yoshizumi.

Yoshizumi will become the tragic heroine of Wakamatsu’s world and Shiraishi’s film, learning to tune out the sex scenes and sexism with the help of booze. Rather than Wakamatsu, the most sympathetic male figure is Masao Adachi, his frequent screenwriter collaborator and an auteurist filmmaker in his own right. Adachi is the only character in Wakamatsu’s orbit who can stand up to him. Yoshizumi also carries a torch for him, despite his being at least a generation older.

One thing is pretty clear throughout Dare. Militant leftists are absolutely miserable people. Seriously folks, start buying into bourgeoisie consumerist values. You’ll be so much happier for it. The film certainly is not a puff piece for Wakamatsu either. Frankly, many viewers coming in without baggage will start to suspect his dirty movies are really just dirty movies. However, Shiraishi and screenwriter Jun’ichi Inoue ultimately humanize him and argue for forgiveness of his excesses.

Regardless, Mugi Kadowaki is rigorously reserved yet strikingly vulnerable as Yoshizumi. It might just be one of the great feminist performances of our postmodern era, but it is unlikely to be recognized as such, since the chauvinism she endures comes from the left (hmm, would the Wakamatsu studio be considered a hostile work environment by today’s standards?). In contrast, as Wakamatsu, Arata Iura is tempestuous and larger than life in big-screen-friendly ways, while Hiroshi Yamamoto anchors the film as the self-effacing Adachi.

Dare is a colorful period production, to put it mildly. However, the Pinku Eiga production scenes are played more for their value as eccentric spectacle rather than for prurient interest. Plus, the soundtrack is pretty groovy. Recommended for both Wakamatsu’s fans and detractors, Dare to Stop Us screens this Thursday (the Fourth of July, an irony that would amuse Wakamatsu) as part of this year’s NYAFF.

First Look ’12: It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve

Masao Adachi is a filmmaker with blood on his hands. An active collaborator with the Japanese Red Army terrorists, he was imprisoned by both the Lebanese and Japanese. Now at liberty and looking considerably older than his sixty-two years, Adachi is making films again. Hopefully, it will keep him out of trouble. Aesthetically radical French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux more or less profiles Adachi in his experimental documentary, It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve: Masao Adachi, which screens during the inaugural First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image.

From the very first frame, Beauty invites a rigorous deconstructing. In footage stylized to resemble home movies, Adachi plays with his young daughter in a park, while his stream of consciousness narration takes stock of his life. Although poetic at times, his command of his faculties sounds spotty. Reluctant to address his revolutionary past directly, he hints at feelings of guilt, doubt, and confusion.

This is a marked contrast to the Adachi Grandrieux interviews directly. He remains a matter of fact Marxist extremist, who defiantly recognizes no distinction between art and politics. Yet, Grandrieux (surely unintentionally) undercuts his authority by slowly blurring his camera’s focus in one sequence and compulsively panning the light fixtures above Adachi in other. The only pure talking head shot is reserved for Kôji Wakamatsu (director of the even more unintentionally revealing United Red Army), his comrade in filmmaking and in arms, who praises Adachi as an “outlaw.”

To all but the most radicalized, Grandrieux’s choice of illustrative film clips from Adachi’s oeuvre will also be distancing. Rather than scenes from Wakamatsu’s riveting but relatively mainstream Caterpillar, which Adachi wrote, we see episodes of locking-and-loading, didactic propaganda voiceovers, and an apparently fatal sexual assault. At one point, Adachi bemoans the inability of 1960’s revolutionary movements to reach the common people. This is why.

Indeed, many of Grandrieux’s striking images undercut the revolutionary program. Adachi’s sweet-tempered little girl is a timely reminder there are things more important than the scientistic dialectics Adachi venerates. The images of him wandering through downtown Tokyo (a capital of capitalism) lit up brighter than Times Square at night amid throngs of energetic young people is also probably not intended to look so appealing. Indeed, Adachi resembles a ghost surrounded by life in full bloom.

Clearly, Grandrieux recognizes strong visuals when he captures them. Fascinating in its use of avant-garde techniques, whether Beauty succeeds or not depends on what you expect from it. It is never a conventional biographical survey, nor does Adachi ever really take stock of his past actions and their implications. However, it is will be a treasure trove for critics and scholars seeking material to interpret according to their preconceptions. It screens once and only once this Sunday (1/8) as part of First Look at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens.

Wakamatsu’s United Red Army

It was certainly red, but not always united. Former underground filmmaker Kôji Wakamatsu witnessed the Japanese New Left degenerate into a loose network of terrorist groups plagued by factionalism and internal power struggles. A sometimes ally and contemporary of the paramilitaries, Wakamatsu has produced a chilling look at the inner workings of the militant left in United Red Army (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York at the IFC Film Center.

Wakamatsu leaves absolutely no doubt where the Marxist United Red Army (URA), as well as its Red Army Faction (RAF) and Revolutionary Left Wing (RLF) predecessors, were coming from. During one of many “self-critique” re-education sessions, their leader, Tsuneo Mori, pretty clearly spells out the need to sacrifice any sense of individuality and embrace death to advance the so-called class struggle. To do anything less is construed as counter-revolutionary, unless you happen to be one of the commanders.

In his largely narrated opening sequences, Wakamatsu tries to suggest the URA terrorists began as misguided anti-war protestors. However, they quickly evolve into violent hardcore Maoists (in fact, when Nixon makes his historic visit to China late in the film, it is a real buzz-kill for the surviving URA faithful). In fact, as Wakamatsu tells the group’s history, one wonders if he realizes how much he actually reveals.

In the second, centerpiece segment of the film, the RAF consolidates with the RLF into the URA, taking to the mountains, ostensibly for military training. Yet, well before the revolution can possibly begin, the Red Army launches a reign of terror within its ranks. Here URA begins to resemble a horror movie, as one-by-one, loyal members are forced to undergo “self criticism,” clearly inspired by the Cultural Revolution, culminating with torture and fatal beatings.

URA concludes with the ill-fated Asama-Sansō hostage crisis, in which a remnant of the terrorist group held an innocent woman captive in her husband’s mountain lodge. Despite his personal disillusionment, Hiroshi Sakaguchi commands his men in this act of horrific folly. As disturbing as the final stand-off might ordinarily be, it is something of a let-down compared to the sheer gut-wrenching cruelty of the self-criticism sessions. What we see in URA is the sublimation of the individual to the collective—a textbook example of how cults work.

Much like Olivier Assayas’s Carlos (in which the United Red Army make a cameo appearance), Wakamatsu’s URA is a whirlwind of dates, places, riots, and terrorist attacks. Yet, as Mori and Hiroko Nagata, the leaders of the URA’s two constituent factions (who also happened to be surreptitiously sleeping together) Go Jibiki and Akie Namiki convey stone cold calculating menace, like nothing you have ever seen on film before. Conversely, Maki Sakai is absolutely haunting as Mieko Toyama, a former friend of Wakamatsu, who comes across as an idealistic peace activist led astray. Indeed, the director clearly wants to consider the entire URA and its militant cohorts in such terms, but he is undermined by the honest brutality of his film.

Wakamatsu is still very much associated with Japanese far left and was banned from entering the United States when URA played at the 2008 New York Asian Film Festival. Whatever his intentions were with the film, it is a tough, disturbing look at violent leftism, unlikely to generate sympathy for his former comrades. Indeed, it shows the line between political extremism and outright insanity is porous at best. Shocking, grueling, and ultimately devastating, the three hour URA is a contemporary masterwork, forcefully recommended when it opens this Friday (5/27) at the IFC Center.

Wakamatsu’s Caterpillar

What ideological extremists call “martyrdom” or “sacrifice” is rather ugly to behold. Dubbed a “War-God,” quadruple amputee Kyuzo Kurokawa should more rightly be considered a war criminal. Indeed, Kurokawa deserves even worse than the daily degradation of his freak-show existence in Kōji Wakamatsu’s scalding WWII-era morality play Caterpillar (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

When we first meet Kurokawa, he is raping an innocent young Chinese girl. We soon learn he treated his wife Shigeko in essentially the same manner, before shipping out in the Imperial Army. Returning home completely incapacitated with only a rudimentary ability to communicate, Kurokawa is now utterly dependent on his wife. Initially though, his attitude towards her remains unchanged, demanding food and intercourse on a regular basis. Yet, slowly Shigeko Kurokawa realizes how profoundly their respective positions have changed.

Though he is still abusive (to the best of his limited abilities), she finds she enjoys the perks and privileges of being the wife of a War-God. She never misses an opportunity to parade him at patriotic assemblies, both to maintain their social position and to humiliate him in public. For his part, Kurokawa starts to lose his ferocious sex drive, resenting the way she services his needs as one might reward an obedient child, while haunted by memories of the Chinese girl he brutalized.

Considering Wakamatsu’s background as a Pinku Eiga filmmaker who broke through to the mainstream, it is hardly surprising his films often involve provocative sexual matter. However, the scenes of the Kurokawas’ marital relations are in a disturbing league of their own. Yet, there is a very definite point to it all.

In his postscript, Wakamatsu explicitly argues war crimes are never isolated incidents, but the deliberate and systematic product of the prevailing power structure on whose behalf the war criminals act. Whether we accept this or not, it is painfully clear Kurokawa never transcends the institutionalized violence of the Imperial government or the misogyny of his society (as established by Wakamatsu). Despite his attempts to universalize Caterpillar’s painfully intimate story, he still does not allow collective guilt to mitigate personal responsibility.

An intense filmmaker, Wakamatsu never shies away from the shocking aspects of his story. Largely but not entirely a two-hander confined to the Kurokawa house and surrounding environs, he shrewdly exploits the staginess of the claustrophobic setting. You are right there with them, like it or not. Fortunately, Caterpillar’s leads are quite riveting, especially Shinobu Terajima, who convincingly conveys a host of conflicting responses simultaneously as the anguished Shigeko. Likewise, Shima Ohnishi suggests much through facial expressions, while forced into what must have been physically uncomfortable situations.

As a filmmaker, Wakamatsu is consistent in his boldness and his decisive rejection of ideology in general. Caterpillar uses a very personal drama as an indictment of Imperial militarism. In contrast, his previous film, United Red Army (which Lorber Films will also release later this month), viscerally depicts in documentary-style the descent into madness of Japan’s homegrown Maoist terrorist militia. Essentially, they are the opposite sides of the same coin and perfect companion films. Caterpillar is a certainly a work of power and directness, but URA is a legitimate masterwork. This week, the former is definitely recommended when it opens tomorrow (5/6) in New York at the IFC Center.