What if New Age pianist/guitarist George Winston weren’t such a bad-ass motherfucker? That’s the question that the soundtrack of the odd new Japanese film Ki no umi (Jyukai) seems to be asking. It’s one of two new Japanese films I’ve watched this week in a heat/humidity/jetlag blur, trying to reacclimate myself to the rhythms of Japanese speech, social discourse, and blowing shit up.
The other movie, Boukoku no Aegis, handles the “blowing shit up” duties. But both movies uneasily graft Japanese social and political debates onto cinematic narrative forms that don’t exactly work for them. I’m relatively sure Boukoku no Aegis won’t make it to America anytime soon; although it’s got a massive budget by Japanese standards, it looks cheap and unimpressive by American action-film standards. Jyukai might arrive at the arts theaters, but my sense is that even most Americans who nominally prefer foreign “artsy films” actually just want to watch Audrey Tautou smiling sweetly at the screen in Amelie, a film that reminded me of someone raking their fingernails across a blackboard in French. For two solid hours. While everyone else in the audience was enjoying it.
Boukoku no Aegis, is one of three recent films based on novels by Fukui Harutoshi, who reportedly is not himself a feverish militarist. One would be hard-pressed to know it from the film, though it’s free of the gung-ho savagery of Schwarzenegger movies like Commando or any of the Rambo movies, like First Blood III: Rambo Basically Creates Al Qaeda.
In Boukoku no Aegis, which translates roughly as “The Lost Country’s Aegis Cruiser,” follows the fate of one of Japan’s Aegis-equipped ships, which is taken over by terrorists and Japanese traitors in an operation simultaneously more complex than Karl Rove’s changing stories and yet more boring than, well, shocked media reports about Karl Rove’s changing stories. After killing the captain, the unnamed terrorists and mutineers announce that they’re going to detonate an American-built chemical weapon in Tokyo and politely request that all the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) sailors leave the boat. They do so, earning the contempt of the terrorist leader. He then blows up another MSDF ships, saying “Nihonjin, yoku miro. Kore wa senso da” (Take a good look, Japanese. This is war.”).
Fortunately, chief petty officer Sengoku (Sanada Hiroyuki, who played the toughest samuari warrior in The Last Samurai and was one of only one-and-a-half things about that film that didn’t make me want to kill myself; the other half-thing was Tom Cruise delivering a speech in English to the Emperor Meiji about what it means to be Japanese, which I would count as a full thing if I thought it was actually intended to be side-splittingly funny) reboards the ship and decides to take on the terrorists more or less singlehandedly.
I know what you’re thinking: Doesn’t this sound a lot like Under Siege, the Steven Seagal film in which an American destroyer’s chef saves Hawaii from nuclear destruction? And didn’t that movie sound a lot like Die Hard?
Right on both counts, and this is the problem, as other critics have noted. It’s not just that the plot itself is unoriginal. Instead, the key mismatch in the movie is the message that Japan needs a real military, combined with a lone-wolf-battling-the-terrorists plot that really doesn’t make the case.
Boukoku no Aegis takes itself far too seriously, with major characters in the film quoting a fictional thesis submitted to Japan’s National Defense University in which the author had spoken about Japan as a “lost nation,”one without purpose. Without a military, Japanese had had to pursue things like wealth and peace, neither of which — it appears — can really sustain a country’s interest. So Japan’s myriad social/psychological/cultural/spiritual crises are the result of its not being able to kick a little more unspecified ass.
I want to be careful about this, because the film doesn’t really specify who is attacking Japan or why. The mutineers have their own complex psychological reasons; the foreign terrorists — who speak Japanese — are a bit murkier in their motives, except for the fact that they despise the Japanese. The movie can’t easily be categorized as anti-anything, as it doesn’t even label North Korea (the most likely culprit) as the bad guy. Instead, the villains simply represent the unnamed threats who want to take advantage of Japan’s spiritual malaise.
Judging from the reactions of the audience with whom I saw it (overwhelmingly male and older than most movie audiences I’ve been with in Tokyo), it was a pretty compelling message. The film reserves most of its scorn not for the anti-Japanese villains but rather for the arrogant, hand-wringing politicians who refuse to stand up for Japan and who seem all too willing to point fingers at one another without actually taking steps to stop the imminent attack.
I should add that one of the most interesting things about the film is Sengoku, the hero. Whereas American heroes in these kinds of films are usually wise-cracking tough guys who perennially seem on the verge of saying “I’m getting too old for this shit,” Sanada is actually a friendly, generous guy who simply shows impressive resolve when the situation demands it.
There was a four-part series published in the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s most widely read (and quite conservative) daily newspaper, back in 2002 after Japan’s Coast Guard sank a suspicious boat, evidently a North Korean spy boat, in December 2001. The series went through the minutiae of the 20-hour chase, with the authors interviewing the captains of the Japanese boats. Where they describe the North Korean sailors as smooth professionals in the way they handled their boat, fired their weapons, etc., the Japanese are described as morally troubled and uncertain about whether they can even fire their weapons. Their willingness to do so ultimately becomes a moment of heroism in the story.
As in that series, Sengoku rises to the occasion but seems shocked that others can harbor such ill will or be capable of such evil. It isn’t a mild-mannered cover for a genuine hero; it’s instead a heroic moment for a virtuously mild-mannered person.
And, I should also point out, it also drains any possible humor from the movie. Give me Bruce Willis saying "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" anytime.
The other film, Jyukai, is similarly contemporary in its theme. The full title Ki no Umi (Jyukai) refers to the forest behind Mount Fuji, and here four suicides (or near-suicides) take place. Japan has an extraordinarily high suicide rate, with over 30,000 suicides each year.
I can’t explain why in any comprehensive way, though I doubt it's just coincidence that the really rapid increase in Japan's suicide rate took place around 1998, when the number of bankruptcies exploded. I would call attention (following the superb work by UC-San Diego economist Ulrike Schaede) to the payoffs that Japanese life insurance firms often make for suicide. For at least some who would like to leave their families with something other than mountains of debt, suicide may be a financially responsible decision — though, of course, it’s profoundly troubling that this would be the case.
Naturally, the problem has not gone unnoticed in Japan. In addition to freaky horror films like Suicide Club, there are any number of novels, articles, etc., about individual and group suicides, and in Jyukai, rookie director Takimoto Tomoyuki seems to want to use suicide to make an artistic contribution while also providing an anti-suicide message.
It doesn’t fully work, though this isn’t because Takimoto is an unskilled director. In the film’s four stories, he shows himself to be a master of color and light, with the dense, lushly green forest becoming so hypnotic that when a flash of color appears (five red apples, a man in a yellow shirt about to place his head into a white noose), it’s jarring. And he has mastered conversational mise-en-scene, with long shots of two actors chatting, reacting naturally to one another without the benefit of montage editing to fine-tune their responses.
The main problem is that the author usually does one or the other of these things. The scenes in the forest mostly consist of an organized crime boss’s hotheaded chauffeur (Ikeuchi Hiroyuki) screaming into his cell phone for about twenty minutes, or a bloodied embezzler carrying on a monologue with a corpse as his audience. This puts an unmanageable burden on each actor, draining the life from each scene, for the simple reason that it’s hard to be all that interested in someone talking to himself for that long.
In the film’s more successful stories, emotionally damaged characters struggle with their pasts. The George Winston Lite music tends to signal their epiphanies, which is an unfortunate choice, because Takimoto manages to draw complex and engaging performances from three of his actors. In her scenes as a train station kiosk cashier, Igawa Haruka (who is most famous in Japan as a swimsuit model, and gets bonus points for being willing to risk her career by looking very frumpy in the film) takes a nearly impossible role and renders it fairly believable, mostly through understatement and passivity, which acts as a shaky cover for her character’s inner turmoil.
But the film’s best section (by far) refers only conversationally to the forest behind Mount Fuji. A detective (Shiomi Sansei) questions a successful businessman (Tsuda Kanji) about his relationship to a woman who had committed suicide in the forest months ago. The story isn’t really about her, and instead we’re treated to a slowly evolving relationship between the two characters. Mark Schilling had it right in describing this section as a “small gem.” Indeed, it might have been even better served as an independent short film rather than a section of a longer movie determined to convince us, as if most of us would doubt it, that suicide is a terribly sad choice.
Incidentally, there's a very nice capsule review in the always reliable Midnight Eye about the film. Jasper Sharp rightly points out that the connection between the detective and the salaryman becomes most pronounced as they share their views about Japan's social meltdowns.
I realize this is a pretty random connection of movies for one review entry. What can I say? I’m still jetlagged.
