Bob Davis is a former film critic for SPIN magazine and a regular contributor to American Cinematographer. He teaches New Asian Cinema at California State University at Fullerton.

Dig In Magazine: Tokyo Sonata (2008) is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s newest film, which screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. The film is a dreary tale of a family that is falling apart, but ends with a sense of hope as they make an attempt to solve their dilemmas. Some of his earlier films are Cure (1997), which has themes of emotional disconnection of human interaction, Pulse (2001), a haunting film about human alienation and disconnection and our human interaction with the impersonal nature of technology in modern urban culture, and Bright Future (2003), a film that also possesses characters that are emotionally isolated and portrays a family with relationships that are disjointed and ironically puts it’s characters’ focus on a jellyfish that symbolizes the dangerous and hazy life course of the film’s youthful, but imperfect characters.

Bob Davis: Wow! That’s a mouthful. For me, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films are much less about certain themes (though you’ve perhaps nailed some of them) than they are about tones, feelings. The films are creepy, vibrant, uncanny, familiar, and alien. Sometimes all at once. It’s no wonder the rights to films like Cure and Pulse were snapped up by Hollywood but that Hollywood, with its abhorrence of subtlety and ambiguity of tone, was incapable of translating them into its own idiom.

DIM: So, what did you think of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new film Tokyo Sonata and how do you think it is compared to his earlier films in terms of plot, characters and themes? What about it did you find interesting or significant?

BD: I saw Tokyo Sonata at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007. The audience, most of whom were familiar only with Kurosawa’s genre films, was unprepared for such a “dysfunctional family drama”. This new film is perhaps closest in its feel to Kurosawa’s 1998 License to Live, about a boy who comes out of an extended coma with the body of a twenty-year-old but the mentality of a ten-year-old. There Kurosawa uses the high concept premise to develop ideas about lost innocence, false expectations. In License to Live the protagonist wants to get his estranged mom, dad, and sister back together, even if just for a moment, to relive his childhood. The movie, like his mom – she flatly tells the boy, “What you want is impossible.” – is utterly unsentimental. Everything goes wrong.

The first 100 minutes of Tokyo Sonata has a similar feel, but instead of a refrigerator falling on the protagonist and killing him (the random ending of License to Live) the dysfunctional family in Tokyo Sonata is transformed by … well, I’ve already given away the ending to one film, maybe I shouldn’t say more.

 

DIM: Both Hirokazu Kore-eda, Still Walking (2008) and Shunji Iwai's, New York, I Love You (2009), just came out with these new films that the American audience is especially keen on. Have you seen either of their newest releases?

BD: I saw Kore-eda’s Still Walking at the London Film Festival a year ago. New York, I Love You is an anthology film, so Iwai is one of ten directors (nine of whom I have no interest in) who contributed short segments to the film. I haven’t seen New York, I Love You yet, but when was the last time you saw a good anthology film?!

DIM: Director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s older films are After Life (1998), Distance (2001), and Nobody Knows (2004).  All of these films seem to explore deep, dramatic and sometimes traumatic themes. What are these films mainly about and do you think that he does a good job at exploring these themes?

BD: My sense is that Kore-eda’s films are becoming less and less successful on a variety of fronts. The three films you mentioned all have intriguing narrative “hooks”. After Life asks what memory we’d like to take with us into eternity. Distance concerns the reunion of the family members of a AUM-like cult who’ve all died in an attempt to poison Japan’s water supply, and Nobody Knows concerns kids who’ve been left to fend for themselves by a crazy mother. All, as you say, relatively traumatic situations.

DIM: It has been said that Kore-eda’s new film Still Walking (2008) falls within the tradition of the legendary director Yasujiro Ozu’s  Tokyo Story (1953)? If you agree, in what way do you think it correlates to it? What did you think of this family drama?

BD: Still Walking is a family drama in the vein of Ozu’s most famous works (Tokyo Story, Late Spring, Who’s Who of the Tenements), but without the family crisis around which Ozu’s movies wrap themselves and without the rigorous formal patterns that makes Ozu’s films so unusual viewing experiences.

DIM: What is the significance of his documentary-style filmatic approach? What do you think this style communicates to the audience and what type of effect do you think it has versus taking a more traditional fictional cinematic approach?

BD: Interestingly, Kore-eda – who trained in non-fiction filmmaking – seems in his last movies (Hana yori mo nao, Still Walking, and his newest film, Air Doll, about a man who falls in love with a sex doll) to have abandoned the documentary style. This is too bad, since what was an interesting marriage of heightened fictional content and documentary style is now being usurped by less radical content and a more generic image-making.

DIM: Shunji Iwai has won numerous awards for his films Love Letter (1995), All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) and Hana and Alice (2004). He had much success in Japan and South Korea with Love Letter, which was released in the United States under the new title When I Close My Eyes. He also teamed up with musicians to create the high school pop film, All About Lily Chou-Chou and went on to develop his first comedy in 2004 with Hana and Alice.

What did you think of these films and Iwai’s focus on youth? What are some more recent examples of Japanese films that surround this popular Japanese obsession with youth?

BD: Love Letter is a professionally made tearjerker. It is a quality example of the kind of film that I typically have no interest in. That said, the Japanese seem to excel at this kind of “nostalgia for youth” genre. A huge percentage of Japanese films take place in classrooms – what could be less appealing to the typical American movie-going 15-year-old – and they inevitably reduce me, who’s often thought of as a heartless @#$%^ by my students, to tears. Hiroki Ryuichi’s Love on Sunday (2007) and Your Friends (2008) are two more recent examples – well-made sentimental stories about kids in uniform. [Hiroki is an interest example of the kind of director the Japanese system has regularly created, someone who goes back and forth between art films (Vibrator), sexplotation films (I Am an S&M Writer, and M) and mainstream efforts like Love on Sunday. Kurosawa Kiyoshi also made his share of soft-core sex films.]

DIM: What choice of music does Iwai use in All About Lily Chou-Chou that makes the film so surreal and moving?

BD: All About Lily Chou-chou is another beast altogether. This movie is sui generis. Its characters are obsessed with the music of a fictionalized artist who claims Debussy as an influence, and Iwai has created a visual and editorial style that matches the music’s impressionism. The movie is 150 minutes of fragile arabeske.

DIM: There have been a number of American remakes of Japanese films, such as horror films like The Ring, The Grudge, and Dark Water. What are some of the other remakes of Japanese films that have been successes in the United States? How do you feel about American remakes of Japanese films or foreign films, in general? Do you think that the remakes do the films justice or sometimes miss the point?

BD: I can’t really answer this because I’ve found the American remakes to be unwatchable. Literally! I don’t think I’ve stayed in the theater until the end of any of them. When the Japanese film causes the hairs on the back of your neck to stand on end, the American remake smacks you in the forehead with a hammer!

DIM: What are your picks in terms of new Asian foreign films, Japanese and beyond? Can you expand on why these films are the ones to see?

BD: The mid-to-late 90s may have seen a peak in interesting Japanese art films. Kitano’s best work ran through the 90s; Iwai, Kurosawa, Miike Takashi, and Kawase Naomi got their real starts; Morita Yoshimitsu made haru, Keiho, and Black House. But I’ll limit myself here to some movies from the past five years:

In Japan, Sono Sion (the director of the infamous and fabulous Suicide Club) has continued his Dionysian explorations with movies like Yume no naka e [Into a Dream] (my favorite film of 2005, a movie that seems to rumbling around inside the head of an insecure actor) and Strange Circus (now available on DVD in the US) and Noriko’s Dinner Table (a companion to Suicide Club). His latest, Love Exposure, is four hours of non-stop deep psychology. Miike’s Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (also now on DVD) is an epic in 80 minutes, part Daivd Lynch, part Jean Genet, part Stephen Hawking. In a report on the 2007 Hong Kong film festival, where I saw it in a theater packed with over a thousand high-school aged girls, I described it as “a pressure cooker of desire roasted over a pit of repressed violence compressed by demonic powers into an infinitesimally tiny singularity sucked back through a black hole of time.”

In Thailand, Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, who trained as an artist in Chicago, has been making a stream of the most powerful artfilms around. Tropical Malady, a love-story in which, during the second half of the film one of the lovers has become a tiger, gets under the skin, speaks about the animal nature of human relationships, in a way no other film I can think of has. Even Quentin Tarantino, chairman of the Cannes jury that awarded the film a top prize, couldn’t shake it.

Korean film has had its moment in the sun. Perhaps the least interesting of the new Korean “auteurs” are the two most famous, Park Chan-wook (Old Boy) and Boon Jong-ho (The Host). Three others have much more to say. Both Hong Sang-soo (A Tale of Cinema, Woman on the Beach, and Night and Day) and Im Sang-soo (The Good Lawyer’s Wife, and The President’s Last Bang) seem to be grinding an ax against the macho, mindless Korean male. Kim Ki-duk lashes out at both sexes in his subtlely hilarious Time, about lovers who test each others’ commitment by leaving the relationship, having enough plastic surgery so as to make themselves unrecognizable, and then contriving to meet again to see whether, new looks and all, they might still fall in love. Unfortunately, the most interesting Korean movies I’ve seen, well, ever, is completely unknown. It’s the only movie by only female director “working” in Korea I know, Shin Jae-in. It’s called Shin Sung-Il is Lost. It takes place in a Christian orphanage, involves lots of Choco pie and self-denial, force-feedings, a revolution. Amazingly bizarre.

Finally, my favorite movie so far this year is also a woman’s, that of the Malaysian director, Yasmin Ahmad, who, sadly, died of a stroke at the age of 51 a few months ago. Her best prior film, Mukhsin, a love story of two ten-year-olds, won her the Best Director prize at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival. Her last film, Talentime, which I saw in Hong Kong, is not even really professionally made. The lighting, the camerawork, the cutting are all, at best, “advanced student” level. But Ahmad’s perfect manipulation of the melodrama and her control of the performances left me devastated during the last 30 minutes of the film.