Dejima 2006 Wrap Up

[Big thanks to regular ScreenAnarchy reader and occassional contributor Peter Cornelissen for the following detailed wrap up of the 2006 Dejima Japanese Film Festival, including first looks at new work by Takashi Miike and others ...]

The Dejima Japanese Film Festival is highlighting the rise in both quantity and quality of Japanese Cinema. While you can almost speak of a ‘new wave’ ever since the big success of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo at International festivals and Takeshi Kitano’s directing debut Violent Cop, the Japanese cinema is still very poorly represented in Dutch, and maybe all Western, cinemas. In the eighteen months since the first edition of the festival only Howl’s Moving Castle and Taste of Tea enjoyed a small theatre run in the Netherlands. The first edition of the festival was a big success and confirmed that there is a very enthusiastic audience for even the more experimental examples of Japanese cinema. Now with the festival location rebuild to fit three instead of just one screening room, causing a slight delay, the festival was back. Bigger and better than I could have hoped for.

There were 22 films shown of which five were International premieres (Arch Angels, Sun Scarred, Mirrored Mind, Love on Sunday and This Side of Paradise). Director Hiroki Ryuichi was invited to present five of his films in a small retrospective. Another guest of the festival was Omori Tatsushi whose debut feature The Whispering of the Gods opened the festival. Both directors stayed for the entire festival, watched some of the other films and Hiroki even had a DJ-set in which he played some very cool Japanese music. Then there were also a panel discussion, a talk show and a festival magazine with very informative in-depth pieces written by International experts on Japanese culture and cinema like David Desser, Aaron Gerow (another guest of the festival, he also hosted the Q&A sessions with Hiroki Ryuichi), Alexander Jacoby and Jasper Sharp. Quite impressive for such a young and still relatively small festival!

The only negative aspect of the growth of the festivals is that most of the screenings weren’t sold out. The fact that the festival is labelled as an art-film festival because no big commercial films or anime were included in the program might have held back some less adventurous cinemagoers as well. There were relatively a lot of Japanese people in the audience and guys in their twenties to early thirties who probably discovered Japanese cinema primarily through the work of Miike Takashi; but they showed equal love for a director like Hiroki Ryuichi. Miike and Hiroki have a similar modus operandi. They are very prolific because they take on a lot of jobs that are paid for and ready to go (e.g., the “Love Cinema” series they were both part of with Visitor Q and Tokyo Trash Baby respectively) and they always manage to put their own signature on these films. The difference between them is that Miike’s films can be labelled shonen (boys) and those of Hiroki shojo (girls) in manga terms, or that Miike focuses on action and Hiroki on characters to tell their stories.

Hiroki Ryuichi received International acclaim with his 2003 film Vibrator. It was for me also the first time I saw a Hiroki film. After that I saw L’Amant at the first Dejima and It’s Only Talk at this years IFFR (now shown again, just because it’s so good). He soon became my new favourite Japanese director and the fact that the festival now held a small retrospective of his work showed I was not alone in noticing his talent. This talent lies mainly in getting incredible performances from his actresses. A lot of his (recent) films feature female protagonists and most of the Q&A sessions focussed on this. Hiroki said his interest is in any kind of human relationships. As a man he finds that women are just a bit more mysterious and thus interesting to him. “I like women!” he joked. And he seems to understand them better than he thinks because he gets a lot of admiration from the large female part of his audience for portraying women so realistically. A lot of the women in Hiroki’s films are unhappy, looking for love and… taking photographs for some reason Hiroki wasn’t really able to explain.

Like Kyoku (debuting actress Kinuwo Yamada) in Girlfriend, Someone Please Stop the World, one of the best films I saw at the festival, who is a struggling photographer. To make a living she accepts a job for an erotic magazine for which she has to ask girls in the streets if they would model for her. This is how she meets Miho (Aoba Kawai) who has a hard time dealing with a father that has abandoned her mother and herself, and the two develop an intimate friendship. Hiroki likes this film together with It’s Only Talk the best of his own work. Shot fast and cheap on digital video the film looked a lot better than some of the other films shot on video that were shown at the festival. Hiroki’s Tokyo Trash Baby sadly was such an example. It’s still important as a turning point in Hiroki’s career because it is here that he started to work more with close-ups instead of keeping a distance and his work became a lot more emotionally involving. I am an S+M Writer shows Hiroki’s roots in pinku-cinema. It’s based on Oniroku Dan’s book Season of Infidelity (a better title I think) that seems to be an autobiographical tale. Hiroku injects a lot of humour and nuance into the story that also makes the graphic acts of bondage-sex an enjoyable part of it, in a non-erotic way. But besides this unusual angle I didn’t find anything really special about the film; certainly not compared to Hiroki’s best works. Love on Sunday, finally, definitely counts as one of his best. The festival screening was the International premiere of this film about teenagers who are one the edge of becoming adults. The focus is again on a girl, Akira. After the final day of school, at the start of the summer holiday, she has to move from the small countryside village of her youth to Tokyo because of her father’s job. Akira invites her childhood friend on whom she has had a crush for years over for a farewell party, but this clueless boy messes up her plans as he brings along his new girlfriend. And the story then gets more complicated leading up to a very moving finale. This is one of those rare teen films that has the intelligence to be equally suited for (nostalgic) adults.

There were two new Miike films at the festival, one very bad and one very good. The bad one was the International premiere Sun Scarred. Not only a prime example of some very bad looking shot on video movie, but also really generic and forgettable stuff story wise. It’s a nasty and utterly predictable story about a guy who needs revenge to get his live back after it’s destroyed by the random violence of a youth gang. The only simple point of possible interest the movie wants to make is that criminals (the youth gang) get more respect and protection from the government than their victims. The difference with Big Bang Love, Juvenile A couldn’t be greater. This is a beautiful looking film with a story that is as cryptic as it is captivating. The world in the film (a prison in a desert landscape next to a big Inca pyramid and a space rocket launching pad) is suspended in time and space. A world of males, of initiation rituals, of live and dead and of love (the original title literally means 4.6 billion year love). The true meaning of the story cannot be simplified to the murder mystery that drives the plot and must be something very personal to the writer I think.

Miike regular Renji Ishibashi who played the police inspector in festival closer Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, also played a rather menacing priest in the openings film The Whispering of the Gods. A nice bit of, probably unintentional, symmetry. I say this because more films at the festival share their actors (Tadanobu Asano could be seen in four films, Kiyohiko Shibukawa in three) reflecting either that these films are part of a real kind of movement or that the pool of good actors in Japan is relatively small. The Whispering of the Gods has been a success for months in Japan. This is caused mainly because of the novel promotion strategy that the producer thought up. He had a movietheater built especially for this film! Independent cinema has to struggle to get seen, also in Japan. But the upside of having a special theatre for your film is that you don’t have to pass it through the censor board. And this brave debut feature is filled not only with beautiful cinematography but also with cruelty to animals and perverse sexuality that might not have gotten through untouched. It’s a quiet but very angry film. The director explained that the main point he wanted to express is “that people should think for themselves”. The true possible meanings of the Christian community that features in the film, as a metaphor, remained vague for me (it could be symbolic for Japan in a way, but also more specifically a representation of Western influences on Japan, or not symbolic at all), but the film is clearly about breaking free from repression and it’s difficulty. After it’s initial success, Whispering of the Gods was also shown in regular theatres, which gives some weight to the think for yourself message of the director.

Interestingly, the influence of Christianity (surely not the main religion in Japan…) could also be seen in Eli Eli Lema Sabachthani? and Arch Angels. This last film is a fun but very juvenile action comedy about schoolgirls at a very elite and strict school run by nuns who are getting faced with a spree of schoolgirl kidnappings. Three of the girls suddenly are gifted with special powers that come in handy when they decide to rescue their classmates and kick some kidnapper butt. The things I liked most about the film are it’s very Japanese cuteness, especially the influence of the gothic lolita fashion, and the fact that it’s filmed at the Huis ten Bosch theme park, a replica of an old Dutch city in honour of the historical Dejima trading post, making this film custom-made for the festival. And it’s also fun to spot the visual references from Kill Bill to Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The best and the worst films at the festival for me were coincidentally also the most experimental entries in the program. Waiting for the Flood is a short feature from Yamada Masafumi who clearly is a favourite of the festival programmers (his first feature Tsuburu no Gara was included in the program of the first Dejima edition). I didn’t see anything especially beautiful or profound in this video experiment, making it a very boring hour to sit through. Nothing much happens so there isn’t really anything else to mention about it. The opposite is true for Sogo Ishii’s Mirrored Mind, although I am sure this equally short feature will leave some people equally cold. Mirrored Mind is a feature expanded from a short that was part of the Jeonju International Film Festival’s 2004 “Digital Short films by Three Filmmakers” program (just like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Haze from the 2005 Jeonju festival was expanded). The screening was claimed to be unique because it’s the only screening planned for this film outside of Japan; and even there it has only been released in a gallery in Tokyo. There is a lot of psychedelic and ‘mirrored’ imagery in this film that could be very tacky if the story told wasn’t so personal to the director and so grounded in reality. The images work perfectly together with the soundtrack, especially in an almost apocalyptic scene that, as turns out later, is accompanied by the pulsating sounds of a defibrillator and heart-monitor. But don’t expect anything “mind-expanding” from that description, this really is a small (and presumably real life) story about a near death experience of a suicidal actress and ex-girlfriend of the director, told with great respect and as an ode to life.

To wrap up this review just a few words on the final three films that I was able to catch. The Hanging Garden is another example of a film in which sound and image together can, in two key scenes, create a truly overwhelming experience. I do not have the time and space here to fully justify this interesting new Toshiaki Toyoda feature, but other than the great experience and enjoyment of the craft that went into the making of it, the film didn’t really make me think… I think. The Buried Forest is the first film from Kohei Oguri in almost ten years. His previous film, Sleeping Man, was the first Oguri film I had seen before (and btw also the first time I saw actor Kôji Yakusho, who gained a lot of critical acclaim at that time with Shall we Dansu? and Lost Paradise and can now be seen in the Hollywood film Babel, onscreen; but I digress). A welcome return and another poetic film but the meandering story (or stories) and a lot of distant and dark, nighttime images are a bit of a letdown. The other forest film, Funky Forest: the First Contact, also didn’t quite live up to the hype. But this was only because I saw it with a small and not very lively audience, late in the evening after already seeing four other films and the enthusiasm I expected (from myself and others) just wasn’t there. Because of this I can agree with those who say it has pacing problems (the length alone is enormous for a comedy). It is the same criticism you can have on Survive Style 5+, Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims or Taste of Tea, but like those films Funky Forest serves up some truly imaginative stuff. It’s a collage of very Japanese comedy vignettes (think Vermilion Pleasure Night), odes to David Cronenberg and very funky musical numbers that I certainly want to revisit soon. The same goes for the Dejima Japanese Film Festival. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another eighteen months this time, because Japanese cinema is still at a highpoint and also still in need of the special platform in the west that Dejima offers.

Review written by: Peter Cornelissen

My ratings of the festival films:
Mirrored Mind (Kyoshin) 9
Girlfriend, Someone Please Stop the World 8,5
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (46 oku nen no koi) 8
Love on Sunday (Koi suru nichiyobi) 8
Funky Forest: The First Contact (Naisu no mori: The First Contact) 8
Hanging Garden (Kuchu teien) 8
The Whispering of the Gods (Gerumaniumu no Yoru) 7,5
Arch Angels (Warau daitenshi (Michael)) 6,5
The Buried Forest (Umoregi) 6,5
I am an S+M Writer (Futei no kisetsu) 6
Tokyo Trash Baby (Tokyo gomi onna) 6
Sun Scarred (Taiyou no kizu) 4
Waiting for the Flood (Teibo wa kozui wo matteiru) 3
Already seen before:
It’s Only Talk (Yawarakai seikatsu) 9
Eli Eli Lema Sabachthani? 8

Thoughts on the state of modern Japanese cinema by International experts exclusively for the Dejima Japanese Film Festival can be read online here:
David Desser - Seven Samurai or Samurai 7
Aaron Gerow - Repetition All Over Again in Recent Japanese Film
Alexander Jacoby - “That Little Band of Men”
Jasper Sharp - Ryuichi Hiroki

Further links:

Very good Midnight Eye reviews of some of the films mentioned:
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/big-bang-love-juvenile-a.shtml
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/buried-forest.shtml
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/eli-eli-lema-sabachtani.shtml
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/smwriter.shtml
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/its-only-talk.shtml
http://www.midnighteye.com/reviews/whispering-of-the-gods.shtml

Twitch archives:
http://www.screenanarchy.com/archives/007535.html big bang love review
http://www.screenanarchy.com/archives/007803.html whispering of the gods info
http://www.screenanarchy.com/archives/005037.html my IFFR review (it’s only talk)
http://www.screenanarchy.com/archives/008194.html funky forest review
http://www.screenanarchy.com/archives/005775.html hanging garden review