JAPAN CUTS 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
Characterized by Japan Society film curator Samuel Jamier as the "little brother" to the storied New York Asian Film Festival, the annual Japan Cuts sampler of contemporary Japanese cinema is often more unpredictable than its volatile sibling. The events, which overlap each other and share a fistful of presentations, pool their DNA without ever being clones. For every psychotronic shazam-a-thon like
Ninja Kids!!!?Takashi Miike's doddering these days, it's onlu his second new film this year?there are a few mood-drenched dramas that contemplate life's colors with a Zen-like grace. The festival trailer offers wistful vistas of families staring out beyond a shore as waves coalesce into spiritual meaning, evoking not hot-wired sensation but a subtler embrace of sentiment.
That's surely the case in
Three Points, a curious composite feature that stitches together dramatic vignettes, shaggy documentary excursions and an elegant, wacky-sad romance into a kind of patchwork of common threads (tattoo parlors, aspiring rappers, low-end yakuza, men and women together) and things that make no goddamn sense at all but are more entertaining for it (such as a homeless crab hunter with an uncanny sense of digging up crustaceans out of deep riverbank mud). The arc stutters from Okinawa (where all the documentary footage is shot) to Kyoto, where an assortment of Japanese hip-hop dudes navigate their way into and out of jail while dealing with relationship dramas, to Tokyo, where the most compelling story unfolds, almost as an urban fable. Director Masashi Yamamoto seems intent on avoiding any sort of groove, letting audience expectations ride on the roulette wheel, letting the shifts on tone and style keep everyone guessing. The final episode,
Switch, fits within a certain latter-day Japanese mode of storytelling: a slacker parable. Iga (Jun Murakami), a not-bad looking deadbeat, rescues Saka (Sola Aoi) and her older lover from a gang that jumps the couple as they make out in an alley. Iga gets his ass kicked, but Saka returns to comfort him, and invites him home with her to recover. He then refuses to leave, gradually evolving from savior to creep to parasite to lover, as Saka reveals her own proclivity for becoming whatever it is a man desires, almost as second nature. (The actress is widely known in Japan as an adult video star, so there's also a casting twist at work.) There are deeper secrets to reveal, and the story's unexpected turns take on a dream-like exposition. Appearances are not what they seem, and love blossoms in unusual moments.
That would also describe the tilt of
Love & Loathing & Lulu & Ayano, at once a kind of broad spoof of the Japanese porn industry and an unlikely saga of a young woman's transformation. The film's bigger-than-life sensibility serves the turnabout of Junko (Norie Yasui), a mousy secretary lured into an audition where she throws on a day-glo wig and a schoolgirl uniform to become Lulu?a sexually emboldened human anime character who submits to the savagely comic shenanigans of a scene while shouting "I want to go to the comic book store!" She immediately attracts a rival, the seasoned performer Ayano (Mayu Sakuma), who has a hard-bitten attitude to go with her long legs and wiry physique. There's also the film's version of a 300-pound basement troll, an obsessed fan who stalks Lulu with increasingly disturbing confessions of devotion, foreshadowing a climax (ahem) that is one of the funniest (if also absurd and over-the-top violent) moments in any recent Asian film (which is saying a lot). Not so much a porn expose as an unexpected female buddy flick,
Lulu works on a couple of levels. Director Hisayasu Sat? has long been known as the "King of Pink," with a catalog of more than 50 pinku titles as lurid as
Uniform Punishment: Square Peg in Round Hole! and
Lolita: Vibrator Torture. Watching with that in mind, the film often feels like a self-reflexive commentary. Yet for all the broad laughs, there's also a spaced-out sweetness, most ecstatically expressed in a spontaneous refrigerated-beverage fight between Lulu and Ayano that veers from girls-gone-wild frivolity into something downright poetic.
Only lovers are left alive in
Battle Royale, a fabled 2000 release?and the final film by
Kinji Fukasaku?that was never distributed theatrically in the United States. Perhaps it might have, if the Columbine massacre wasn't so fresh in public memory, a salient event as the story concerns a class of high school kids turned loose on a remote island to wipe each other out. The film's tongue-in-cheek dystopia posits a future Japan under military rule where rebellious teens are kept in check by an annual "battle royale," in which the winner is the last schoolgirl (or boy) standing. Oppressed nerds are given license to kill. Girl's bathroom taunts are now answered with hand grenades. Freshly perforated, and to-die-for fashionable, crush objects confess their secret love for the girl who just blasted them with an automatic weapon. Cult hit to go! After a decade as a beloved video totem,
BR has again made the big screen. (The Brooklyn Academy of Music notoriously screened the film in 2001.) The gallows humor, heartbreak ballad sentimentality and crunchy political commentary suggest a John Hughes comedy hijacked by Sam Fuller on a suicide mission?with brutally deadpan
"Beat" Takeshi Kitano at the helm, playing the students' old teacher, still pissed off about a hallway stabbing incident years earlier. The action's
Lord of the Flies/
The Most Dangerous Game/
Punishment Park vibes aside, it's really a tribute to the magic of young love. Teen spirit has a body count, but damn if it ain't sweet.
[Japan Cuts: The Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema continues through July 22 at Japan Society in NYC.] 
Posted by ahillis at July 9, 2011 8:37 AM
No comments:
Post a Comment