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.