I'll introduce my favorite directors time to time.
黒沢 清 |
Right after I’d stacked with the films of Tsai Ming-Liang (TML), I totally felled into the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Because I’ve been away from Japan for 8 years, I totally missed seeing his films except the legendary film “The Excitement of Do-Re-Mi-Fa girl” on video and “License to Live”, which I saw at the New York Film Festival in 1999.
Although, he’s been already well known as “The other Kurosawa” in France, He’d not known here in the US until “CURE” opened commercially at theaters. There was a retrospective of him with 6 recent films at the Screening Room, so I had a chance to see some of his films on screen.
Unlike the films of TML, K Kurosawa’s films seem so various and different from each other and looks almost no genre. However, I just picked some notable points of his later films (since I’ve been missing so many of his early films).
1) "Asking the same questions" - like “Who / what you are” “Where we are”, etc.
2)“A dramatic incident happens to ordinary people in non-dramatic way"
3) "Using the same actors over and over" Koji Yakusho, Sho Aikawa, and Yoriko Doguchi, etc.
4) "Great timing of big events" - There is no clue or prologue. It just happens all over a sudden.
5) "Skipping the big moment" - the same as above.
6) "Make people scared with not showing" - the same as above.
7) "Repeating the same lines, same shots, or same scenes"
8) "Some special way to kill women" - They’re strangely done somehow.
9) "Splatters" and ”Ghosts”
10) "Ideal married couples" - Wonder if it comes from his private life…
11) "The title seems to have no connection to the story" - Right???
I think this is the best of his films to begin with (I guess that’s why it was chosen as the first commercial film in the US). It has the story to conclude clearly and still in a twisted way.
The part, which makes you scared is not the bloody part but the physiological part. The images near the ending are so beautiful like the Tarkovsky films.
Actually, this is my favorite of his films I've seen so far. The philosophical theme and the beautiful image really fascinate me. At the same time, there are so many traumatic scenes, which are not splatter but just scary.
It almost seems like a sequel of “CURE” to me. It’s like depends on what case Yakusho, who are a detective in both films, gets. In this case, he happened to wonder in a forest and meets the monster tree and people, who have something to do with it. However, he, as an ordinary people, gradually looses his nerve and temper, and can do anything in the end (doesn’t matter if it’s a good or bad).
If you never heard of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and see this film as the first one, you might get confused this film with the one by Takeshi Kitano. Since the casts, story, or even some way of filming are similar to Takeshi’s, it seems hard to find K Krosawa’s taste in this film. However, the part with Sho Aikawa (who is not the Kitano film actor) and his wife are definitely his, which are so calm, flat, and peaceful.
I actually saw this film before "Serpent Path", because I’m a fan of Susumu Terajima (from “Hole in the Sky"). His role is very important but was unfortunately very small.
This is a kind of sequel of “Spider’s Path” (although this film opened two months before “Spider…”), whose lead has the same name and similar situation.
I like this film much better than “Spider…”, because it has much clearer twist and the actors are a lot better than “Spider…”. Teruyuki Kagawa (from ”Boy’s Choir”) was great, and I loved the mute woman, who is actually a strong Yakuza.
The only disappointment was that there was no pay-off about the girl found who is Kagawa. The real name of the girl is the lead character’s name of both films, so I bet the girl came into this filmmaking from the beginning, though.
I don’t know if it’s because it was made for a TV movie, I thought the script was cheaply written, although it got those big actors, Koji Yakusho and Jun Fubuki.
As the title suggests, you see a lot of ghosts in this film. However, it was not a horror film but was more likely a preaching story to me (of course, the ghost was really scary - - - especially in that open cafe!). I was expecting that Yakusho and Fubuki gradually become mentally broken, but the resolute was quite moralistic.
BTW, the student played by Kusanagi of SMAP was the worst among those characters in K Kurosawa films. And Sho Aikawa, who played the Shinto priest was funnier than ever…
This film has no genre!!! Although K Kurosawa said he wanted to make a film something like ”The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, I couldn’t see anything in common within this film. This was experimentally made with the students of Film Art School in Tokyo, where he was teaching for a semester. So, you can enjoy some student-film like props and set decorations in the entire film.
But no story? No Pay-off? No nothing but images??? Sorry, but I couldn’t see any love between those two leads (could be the actors’ fault, though). Everything looked so inorganic. Maybe that’s the way he sees love? I don’t know…
BTW, I saw so many things in common between this film and the films by Tsai Ming-Liang. I know he loves Edward Yang, but those speechless characters and the dark lightings were more likely to TML’s. I wonder if he’s seen “The River” or “Revels of the Neon God”…
I missed to see “Pulse”, which won the critic award at Cannes this year. I am really hoping they will show it at the New York Film Festival this year!
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