Somehow,
Ukon Gondo managed to fall in with a small group of Japanese leftist nationalists.
They combine the fervor of Imperialist WWII denial with leftwing contempt for
commerce and capitalism. Wisely, society shuns them, especially women. However,
Gondo will find camaraderie with the unlikeliest brothers in Nobuhiro Yamashita’s
Hard-Core, which screens during the 2019 New York Asian Film Festival.
Gondo
has anger management issues that often require his contemptuous junior
executive brother Sakon to bail him out of scrapes. His only work is a weekly gig
digging for the presumably mythical lost gold of an ancient shogun in an
abandoned mine, under the supervision of Kaneshiro, the doddering nutter “Chairman”
of his small but extreme political party. Gondo’s closest companion is the
hulking but slow-witted Ushiyama, whom he takes a protective interest in.
Then
one day they stumble across an Iron Giant-like robot that they dub “Robo-o.” He
looks retro on the outside, but he has a blazing fast processor on the inside.
They essentially treat him like a friend and fellow party-member, until Sakon activates
his communication interfaces. He also has the notion to exploit Robo-o’s gold
detection capabilities. There might actually be gold in that darn hill, but
Gondo is more interested in Taeko Mizunuma, the nympho-divorcee daughter of
Kaneshiro’s lieutenant and dig foreman.
Hard-Core
is
an awkward shaggy dog of a film, but it is compellingly earnest and refreshingly
averse to cliché and sentimentality. Like Gondo, Yamashita clearly scorns cutesiness,
but he connects with his characters on a very humanistic level. The science
fiction elements are definitely on the light side, but they are still there,
albeit rendered with defiantly low-fi grubbiness. Regardless, the film is
probably best classified as an urban fable.
Takayuki
Yamada does not say much, but he expresses quite a bit through glares and the
black smoke that nearly wafts out of his ears. Takeru Satoh hits the right
ambiguous notes as the hard-to-pin-down, but undeniably disdainful Sakon, while
Yoshiyoshi Arakwa projects Ushiyama’s sensitive soul, without resorting to
distasteful shtick or caricatures.
Based
on Carib Marley well-regarded manga series, Hard-Core is sort of like
Joel Shumacher’s Falling Down, crossed with The Iron Giant. There
is plenty of commentary regarding the economic and social squeeze faced by
working-class men without advanced degrees. Yet, what really makes the film
work is the friendships that develop between the three outcasts. Recommended
surprisingly highly, Hard-Core screens this Saturday (6/29), as part of
NYAFF ’19.
