Sunday, Dec 30, 2001
A good year for Japanese cinema
Gautaman Bhaskaran
TOKYO, DEC. 29. Japanese cinema was at its best this year after a long time. One film critic here, Mr. Mark Schilling, says that 2001 has been the strongest in more than a decade. ``I began reviewing in 1989, and this is the first year since then that I find this cinema strongest, both commercially and artistically,'' he writes. There was some indication of this at Cannes last May. There were 10 entries from Japan in several sections: among them, there were three in the top competition slot and two in the important sidebar, A Certain Regard. Had there ever been three movies competing at the French Riviera? Not to the best of one's knowledge, at least not in the past 10 years. Mr. Shohei Imamura's ``Warm Water Under A Red Bridge'' may not have won him a Golden Palm this summer - as his earlier ``The Ballad of Narayama'' and ``The Eel'' did - but the work was not entirely without the 75-year-old master's classic touch. Part reality, part fantasy, it traces the life of an unemployed man who regains life's vitality when he meets a strange woman with magical powers. Shinji Aoyama's ``Desert Moon'' places Japan's current dilemma in an interesting perspective: a man is caught in a professional and personal crisis brought on by a declining economy and growing unemployment. Hirokazu Koreeda's ``Distance'' takes another look at the Aum cult tragedy - where members of the cult tried gassing Tokyo's underground rail system - through the eyes of four victims. These three films are not just some of the year's most significant but are close observations of some of the problems threatening to blow holes in Japan's social fabric. Veteran Jun Ichikawa's ``Tokyo Marigold'' looks even more deeply at societal discomfort: a sense of loneliness and fear forces a young woman to cling on to a man, already attached to somebody else. ``Can I be your girlfriend for a year'', she pleads with him. Based on an important work of fiction, ``Tokyo Marigold'' may not say as much as the literary piece does, but it is clear that economic downturn has made a recluse out of many. John Williams - whose gripping ``Firefly Dreams'' that takes a peek into an unusually warm relationship between a teenage girl and an elderly, senile woman - told this correspondent that he was concerned about young frustration. ``Many of them have literally built a wall around themselves. They have stopped communicating with their peers. They usually sit in the last row of a college classroom, often with a vacant look in their eyes that seem to suggest some form of autism,'' Williams, who also teaches in a Tokyo university, said. Also of enormous appeal has been Masato Ishioka's ``Scoutman''. Its attraction among the ticket-paying public and the computer-wielding journalists can perhaps be explained by the movie's hard look at yet another social malaise. Ishioka narrates the story of a man who recruits young girls (some in high school) to play pornographic parts in adult video pictures, a thriving industry in Japan that also goes by the name of ``Pink Cinema''. Other films that made a mark this year did not exactly deal with Japan's present state of disenchantment. Isao Yukisada's ``Go'' focusses on the minority Koreans, and weaves a romance between a youth from the community and a Japanese girl. Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relative of the legendary director) has made a bizarre thriller, where the dead emerge out of computer screens to attack the living.
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