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Unlike last year, I didn’t see a lot of films at the festival. I only saw five. This is partly because the selection was not as good, but mostly because I didn’t have as much time. But in spite of my lack of enthusiasm for this year’s festival, I have to say that the films I saw were not bad.
I saw all of these films with Zabladowski, except the last one, which we both saw, but in separate screenings.
Please note: All my reviews contain some spoilers! (I will try to keep them to a minimum.)
Also: I apologize in advance for the ridiculous length of this review. Zab saw the film and was rather puzzled by it. He asked me to give him an in-depth interpretation, so I did the best I could.
1. YUMENO (Japan)
The lives of three characters become entangled following a double-murder and a suicide. A young man beats up his girlfriend and finds that he has made a big mistake when she turns out to be working for a group of Yakuza (Japanese mafia). They threaten to kill him if he doesn’t pay them for the damage he has made to their business. Desperate for the money, he tries robbing the parents of another girl he has recently met, Yumeno. But when the mother tries to call the police and the father shows up shortly after, the robbery turns into a double-murder, and the young thug still doesn’t have the money to pay the Yakuza. So he kidnaps Yumeno, uses her to get the money from her father’s bank account, and then runs away with her to the remotest areas of Hokkaido, trying to escape the police and the Yakuza.
Meanwhile, a young boy who lives alone with his alcoholic father is suddenly orphaned when his father commits suicide. He goes on a journey to find his mother, whom he blames for his father’s suicide. But along the way, he witnesses Yumeno and her parents’ murderer disposing of the bodies. The murderer is left with no choice but to also kidnap the young boy and to bring him on his journey, with the intention of disposing of him eventually.
That’s the story in chronological order, but it is not presented that way in the film. We begin in media res, with the young man being pursued by a Yakuza. We see scenes of Yumeno and the young boy, without knowing what the connection between the three characters will be. The first section of the film comes to a climax with the violent murder of Yumeno’s parents (which coincides with the young boy receiving a phone call from the police informing him that his father his dead), and with Yumeno coming home, finding her dead parents and stabbing the killer in the stomach. After this, there is a flashback that explains the connections between the killer, the Yakuza, Yumeno and her parents.
Experiments with broken timelines can be a little tiresome, but thankfully this film didn’t go overboard. After this one flashback, we return to the “normal” timeline established at the beginning of the film and continue on to the end. The flashback doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than to help the pacing of the film by putting some of the more exciting scenes near the beginning and grabbing the viewer’s interest.
A problem that I think some viewers might have with the film is that the characters are not particularly easy to identify with. There is this strange (mis)conception, especially among North-American audiences, that in order for a film to be worth watching, the protagonists have to be “sympathetic,” so that if something bad happens to them we can feel sorry for them, and when things turn out okay in the end, we can feel good about the outcome. In my opinion, that’s complete bullshit. A character only needs to be developed in a realistic way and given some psychological depth for me to be interested. As human beings, you may like or dislike them, but this doesn’t have any bearing on your appreciation of them as well-developed characters put into a certain situation where certain things will happen to them.
This is the case with the characters in YUMENO. The three main characters are equally developed and the film invites us to identify with each of them in different scenes. The young man who beats up his girlfriend, kills another girl’s parents, then tries to kill a young boy to eliminate all witnesses is not a particularly sympathetic character. In fact, he’s downright despicable. And yet there is something oddly compelling in the desperate way in which he keeps moving forward, never taking a step back to think about the consequences of his actions. In one of the scenes during the major flashback of the film, Yumeno tells him that she is running away from home because she doesn’t approve of her father’s job at a missile factory. His response is that she takes things too seriously. “I stopped being serious,“ he says. “When you’re serious, people can see what you’re capable of. I don’t want my abilities to be so obvious.”
In the last part of the film, the young boy kills his kidnapper by smashing his head in with a metal pipe. After the first few blows to the man’s head, he offers Yumeno a chance to finish him off, but she recoils in horror, and the boy finishes the job himself. Killing doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on him, and a few scenes later he tells Yumeno matter-of-factly that tomorrow he will kill his mother. In order to understand this character, we have to go back to his first scene in the film. He’s walking home with two schoolmates. They are talking about an essay they wrote on what they want to be when they grow up. His schoolmates want to be doctors or firefighters, but he says he wants to be “a normal adult.” His mother’s departure and his father’s alcoholism have already made him feel that there is something wrong with his life, but because he is still a child he can at least hope that he will grow up to be a normal adult. But when he learns of his father’s death, any hope of normality is thrown out the window. On his way to find his mother, he rides his bicycle past his two schoolmates. They ask him where he is going. His answer: “I have already become abnormal.”
Killing his mother is the logical reaction of a child who has been profoundly hurt and who doesn’t know how else to grieve. But although he blames his mother, he also seems to feel guilty for his father’s suicide. His father was drunk the last time he saw him. Their final moment together is actually the only time the father appears in the film. He asks the boy if he wants to go skating, but the boy answers: “No, you’ve been drinking.” The father then leaves, saying he is going to buy cigarettes. The boy, with his back to his father, responds with a grunt. He doesn’t turn to take one last look at his father, unaware that this is his last chance to see him alive.
This scene occurs fairly early in the movie, but it is emphasized by a brief flashback later in the film, shortly after the longer flashback that tells the backstory of Yumeno and her parents’ murderer. This one is a different type of flashback. Whereas the first was a simple break in the narrative structure of the film, this one is clearly a memory that occurs inside the mind of a character (the boy). There is one subtle detail that I am not 100% sure was there (I’d have to see the film again to verify) but if I am right about this, it’s a really nice touch. I think we see the father’s face more clearly in the flashback than in the original scene. When he says his line: “I’m going out to buy cigarettes,” it’s a different camera angle, a close-up of his face, whereas the first time around it was all one long shot, from a different angle which made it difficult to see his face. This is a nice touch because the second time around we are no longer watching the scene from an objective fly-on-the-wall perspective, but from the boy’s consciousness, remembering the scene as he experienced it. And yet, we know that his back was turned to his father during that scene. The fact that the director and editor actually made a point of adding that shot of the father’s face clearly is evidence that this memory is a subjective one, and therefore it becomes emotionally charged as the boy is projecting a final image of his father’s face, which he didn’t actually see. Immediately after this brief memory, the boy goes skating.
At the end of the film, he is on his way to meet his mother. He arrives to the address that was on the postcard she sent her years ago, but finds a man living alone with his young daughter. The man tells him that the boy’s mother (his wife) died of cancer a year ago. He says that she loved him dearly, that she never stopped thinking about him and saying his name, even on her deathbed. He wants the boy to stay with him, saying that the mother would have wanted it that way, but the boy doesn’t want to hear it. He runs away and returns to Yumeno, who was waiting for him outside.
The final scene of the film has them both on a boat, leaving the island of Hokkaido for a place where they can “reinvent themselves,” as Yumeno puts it. Facing the icy water, Yumeno lets out a primal scream, but the liberating effect of that scream is undercut by the framing of the shot. Her face is enclosed by some metal bars from the structure of the boat, giving the impression that although she is screaming at the top of her lungs, the scream provides no release. Her scream is going nowhere and reaching nobody.
A few more notes on points that I could maybe elaborate on...
Brilliant use of sound, music and silence in the film. There was a very nice, contemporary score written for the film, and it was used tastefully and sparingly to add mood to some of the scenes, never to dictate emotions. I like that the most intense scenes in the film (especially the scenes involving violence) did not have any music. Hollywood directors, take note. The film also featured some rather lengthy scenes in near silence, which is always a huge challenge to theatre audiences. It makes everybody very uncomfortable, but it’s daring and in this case, I think it worked very well.
I also liked the elliptic editing style of the film, which is typically Asian (and perhaps especially Japanese). Essentially, what this means is that you get very little cuts within scenes, but there are long periods of time missing in between scenes. This is an editing style that has its roots in Ozu and that is about as anti-Hollywood as I can imagine, but which I much prefer.
Finally, I want to just mention that I love Japanese films that take place in Hokkaido. The snow, the wind, the cold... I always like to see real weather caught on film, and this film was full of it. It also allows the director of photography to use a very simple colour scheme, almost black and white, with so much snow and ice outside. In this context, the characters of Yumeno and the boy, dressed in red and blue, respectively, stand out in the snow and the colours seem to take on a kind of special significance, because they are isolated in all that whiteness. I haven’t given it much thought, but it was hard not to notice.
A very strange film, which probably won’t get released in North America. But it’s worth checking out for fans of Asian cinema. The more I think about it, the more I like it, actually.
I’ll post the other reviews later on.
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World Film Festival 2005 - my reviews (Read 4,819 times)
