Move Over Ozu

A recent touring season of contemporary Japanese films on the theme of family, curated by the Japan Foundation and Midnight Eye’s Jasper Sharp, is seeking to show that there is more to modern Japanese film than J-horror and Yakuza flicks, which currently dominate the international distribution channels. The title alludes to classical maestro Yasujiro Ozu, whose films invariably revolved around the trials and tribulations of a family. However what is immediately evident from the varied interpretations of this theme, the six films here are anything but classical.

Hanging Garden (Kûchû Teien, 2005) by Toshiaki Toyada shows how a rootless, falsely happy middle class family tears itself apart through its own policy of honesty. The film centres on Wild Monkeys, a garish love motel replete with kitsch psychedelic décor and a revolving bed, which becomes a centre point for the various family member’s not-so-secret trysts throughout the film. These encounters are then cheerily announced over family birthday gatherings, which invariably turn into occasions for sordid ritual humiliation presided over by the ever-smiling mother Eriko (Kyoko Koizumi), an epitome of false domestic tranquillity; each gathering pushing the family closer to the brink. Hanging Garden certainly demonstrates the uncanny ability many modern Japanese, and more recently Korean, films have of changing tone on a dime, but Toyoda perhaps overplays the horror elements, which threaten to swallow the acerbic humour of many other scenes. It seems that when the façade of the nuclear family implodes, then the fall out is best expressed in the style of Takashi Miike – perhaps the modern family melodrama in Japan is not as divorced from the country’s better known horror cinema as might be expected.

Sway (Yureru, 2006) by female director Miwa Nishikawa, is an exceptionally well-executed study of the relationship between two very different brothers following the traumatic death of Chieko, a girl they both covet, whilst they are visiting a remote beauty spot with a rickety old suspension bridge. But did she fall or was she pushed? And what exactly did Takeru witness? The ensuing courtroom drama seeks out to answer these questions, but only reveals the gulf of jealousy and repressed emotion that lies between the two brothers. A masterpiece of understated drama and shifting perceptions.

Licence to Live (Ningen Gokaku, 1999) is an unconventional film from Japanese horror director Kiyochi Kurosawa. It follows the efforts of Yutaka to reestablish his life and his family after he awakes from a ten year coma, before eventually being crushed to death by a teetering pile of refrigerators in what may be the most arbitrary death i have seen in a Japanese film (and that's saying something). The film's set up and tone is reminiscent of Shohei Imamura's The Eel, about a released murderer rebuilding his life in the company of various eccentrics in a provincial town. Stylistically it is also quite close to Kitano's work, with its deadpan humour, sudden bursts of slapstick and hard cuts between two vastly different tones, however without the magnetic intensity of Kitano around which the fragmented elements can coalesce the film looses some momentum in its latter parts.

This weekend's films give an encouraging impression of Japanese cinema beyond the usual suspect directors. What unites the disparate director’s approaches to their material is not so much the family drama, but how each one has revived this tried and tested genre, the rules of which were established as long ago as Ozu, through an electrical charge of style and narrative flare.