Japan Cuts ’21: School Radio to Major Tom & Go Seppuku Yourselves (shorts)

It is sort of like Love Letters for geek culture, but it is an analog throwback, which makes it cooler. Two lonely high schoolers collaborate on a radio drama, despite never meeting. Yet, a connection is still made in Chisaka Takuya’s short film School Radio to Major Tom, which screens on-demand as part of the experimental shorts package offered by this year’s Japan CutsFestival of New Japanese Film.

Those who attend this high school during the day and those assigned to the night shift rarely meet. It is a hard-and-fast social division, but Eisuke Hoshi doesn’t really fit into any cliques. His primary activities involve his solo stewardship of the school radio. As a result, he is quite surprised when his night-time counterpart discovers the tapes of his science fiction serial and starts recording the part of Major Tom in her own voice.

Technically, Takuya never quotes from “Space Oddity” verbatim, but he paraphrases it all over the place. If it was a rights issue, the Bowie estate is being short-sighted, because this is the most potently nostalgic film they could ever hope to have showcase his tunes.

Even though they do not share any proper scenes together, Chka Arakawa and Tokuma Kudo are both terrific as the young radio programmers. It is hard to precisely describe their relationship, but they definitely make it into something.

Fittingly, the film’s grungy VHS-looking really suits the 1989 setting and the analog media that plays such a role in the film. Strictly speaking, School Radio is a teen drama, albeit a rather mature and wistful one, but the science fiction story the characters spin (heavily Bowie-influenced with maybe a touch of Space 1999) gives it extra genre appeal. Very highly recommended, School Radio to Major Tom screens as part of the experimental shorts package (even though it is totally accessible) during this year’s Japan Cuts (and it also screens on-demand with It’s a Summer Film! at Fantasia.

Japan Cuts '20: Wolf's Calling (short)

It was a questionable application of a problematic law. Much to his dismay, director Toshiaki Toyoda was arrested (but never charged) for possession of an antique firearm that had been passed down through generations of his family. At least it inspired this short film. A young woman will uncover a similar heirloom in Toyoda’s Wolf’s Calling, which screens as part of the Japan Society’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film (all virtual this year).

The woman did not know what to make of the piece, but presumably her ancestor did. Toyoda now flashes back to the Edo era, more or less. Samurai like Rurouni Kenshin largely thought guns were cheating, but if you had someone packing, you definitely put him in front. Eventually, that warrior will come to the fore. However, Toyoda will not show us the battle. Instead, we only witness the call-to-arms and assembly at Kasosan Shrine. It sounds simple, but it is still pretty awesome to behold.

The forest-shrouded shrine is an enormously cinematic location that Toyoda films from many dramatic and inventive angles. This is one of the rare short films that really deserves to be seen on the big screen—the bigger, the better. The sound should also be cranked up, because the evocative soundtrack was composed and performed by Seppuku Pistols, who bring a punk rock aesthetic to traditional Japanese courtly music. As a bonus, Calling features a number of prominent Japanese films stars, including Tadanobu Asano as the veteran Takashi Shimura-like samurai.

Japan Cuts ’13 & NYAAF ’13: I’m Flash

Rui Yoshino’s family heeded the advice of a certain science fiction novelist.  They started their own religion.  Perhaps cult would be a more accurate term.  Regardless, his telegenic looks have served the church well during his tenure as “Guru.”  Unfortunately, scandal threatens to disrupt the family business in Toshiaki Toyoda’s I’m Flash (trailer here), which screens tonight as a co-presentation of this year’s Japan Cuts: the New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema and the New York Asian Film Festival.

The Guru has not been himself lately.  Physically, he is fine.  He walked away from the car crash that killed a motorcyclist and left his single young lady passenger in a coma.  However, the incident has left its mark in other ways, as viewers will learn over time.  To protect their frontman and their interests, the family sequesters the Guru in his tropical compound, recruiting three unnamed underworld types to serve as his bodyguards.  Their services will indeed be needed.

A controversial figure in his own right, Toyoda bounced back from his unplanned filmmaking hiatus with two wildly idiosyncratic films.  His hard-rocking period fantasy Blood of Rebirth is a redemption allegory of unusual power, which will reverberate in viewers’ heads, perhaps for all eternity.   His subsequent Monster’s Club, an austere invitation to sympathize with the devil, might have been more about exorcising some of his own tortured demons.  Happily, I’m Flash is an eerie return to form and arguably Toyoda’s most accessible film since his “troubles.”  In fact, I’m Flash often seems poised on the brink of a caustic noir portrait of corruption in the Chinatown tradition, yet it always remains slyly elusive.

Death Note’s Tatsuya Fujiwara nicely hints at the imp of perverse lurking inside the not-as-dumb-as-he-looks Guru and Ryuhei Matsuda sets off all the right alarms bells as the bodyguard who is not too young and impetuous or old and cantankerous, but just deadly right.  Kiko Mizuhara also keeps viewers thoroughly off balance in her flashback sequences as the mystery woman.  Still, everybody wilts when sharing the screen with Michiyo Ookusu as the Guru’s Machiavellian mother—have mercy.

Like everything about Toyoda, I’m Flash is bound to be divisive.   Those with a taste for intelligently challenging films will appreciate its genuine air of mystery.  It is also a surprisingly handsome production, capitalizing on the evocative locale and subtly creepy set design, most notably the Guru’s villa, which looks as if it could grace the cover of both Architectural Digest and Cult Living.  

Toyotarô Shigemori’s cinematography is also weirdly effective, in a way that is difficult to pin down.  Over-used as a form of critical shorthand, the term “fever dream” does not really apply here.  This is clearly our world, in broad daylight, but something still feels not quite right. Very highly recommended for the moderately adventurous, I’m Flash screens at the Japan Society, this evening (7/11), the opening night of this year’s Japan Cuts, in conjunction with the New York Asian Film Festival.

Japan Cuts ’12 & NYAFF ’12: Monster’s Club

Not content with the sarin gas cult and the United Red Amy, transgressive auteur Toshiaki Toyoda has also relocated Ted Kaczynski to Japan.  He’s welcome to him.  Toyoda’s takes the audience inside the cabin of Ryoichi Kakiuchi, as he is called in this context, if not necessarily his soul in Monster’s Club (trailer here), which screens as a joint presentation of the 2012 Japan Cuts and New York Asian film festivals.

Kakiuchi likes to send bombs to prominent members of the economic establishment.  Everyone should have a hobby.  If you are wondering why, he’d be happy to explain.  His Henry George-ish ideas on labor and production are the whole point of his terrorism.  He was not always a psychopathic loner.  Viewers will come to suspect his evil evolution was initiated by some profound family trauma, most notably involving the radical brother he idolized, when the mad bomber is visited by either ghosts from the past or hallucinations.

While not exactly soliciting sympathy for Kakiuchi, Toyoda expects viewers to appreciate his complexity.  However, the soul-deadened fanatic seems a rather simplistic, emotionally frozen character.  After a few setbacks in life, suddenly everyone is either an exploiter or an unenlightened slave in his judgment and therefore fair game for devices that go boom.

Frankly, patrons are well within their rights if they decide they are disinclined to identify with someone who kills people to serve his extremist ideology right from the outset.  To make matters more daunting, the severe reserve of Eita’s performance and the chilly detachment of Toyoda’s approach do little to pull in the reluctant, in spite of themselves.

A bold stylist, Toyoda creates some striking visuals in Club.  Yet, the epic catharsis of his last film, Blood of Rebirth, is conspicuously missing here.  A metaphysical allegory largely considered a veiled commentary on his much publicized legal trouble, Toyoda dragged the archetypal Buddhist hero Oguri Hangan Daisukeshige through the dark recesses of his soul, ultimately embracing life on the other side.   Conversely, Kakiuchi withdraws from life, while rhetorically berating those who live an unexamined existence.  Rebirth also had some monster drum breaks.  Still, Mayuu Kusakari, who was so devastating in Toyoda’s prior film, again has some finely turned moments in a smaller role, Kakiuchi’s sister, who is alive and well and beginning to understand her brother is out of his mind.

If you are looking for whizbang plotting, this is not the film for you.  If your aesthetic sensibility leans more towards the austere, then maybe.  It is certainly a challenging cinematic statement by any measure, but at least it clocks in at a manageable seventy-two minutes.  Toyoda is a filmmaker who always merits attention and his work has a tendency to appreciate in the viewers’ subconscious.  In retrospect, Rebirth has become one of my most vivid cinematic memories of 2010, so who knows how Club will ferment over time.  Narrowly recommended for hardy and slightly unkempt cineastes, rather than us tragically unhip bourgeoisie, Monster’s Club screens Sunday (7/15) as a co-selection of this year’s Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema and the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival.