Forum
BERLIN -- Substitute navel-gazing with still shots of blood spit into rice or sustained dull stares at the window, and you get a sense of the self-obsessed and punishing neurosis that dominates What the Heart Craves. Making his sophomore feature with the same bargain-basement budget as his award-winning debut, The Soup One Morning, Izumi Takahashi gets extraordinary dramatic mileage out of a hate-triangle of ex- and current lovers/roommates and their entanglement with other characters.
While Takahashi is recognized by critics and arty festivals as an accomplished scriptwriter and alternative directorial talent especially in his partnerships with actor-director Hiromasa Hirosue, few buyers who care for production values and aesthetic quality would put his latest effort in their shopping cart.
At a casual after-party of a wedding reception, Kurata (Hiromasa Hirosue) performs a magic trick with keys. The keys wind up getting swapped, and Kurota goes home with his friend Mukai's key. Mukai gets ex-girlfriend Shitara (Midori Shin-e)'s key, while she ends up with Kurota's. This becomes a carte blanche for each of them to go on a merry-go-round of unannounced house visits.
Shitara discovers that Kurata has been sheltering a neighbor from her abusive husband, and makes the woman her protege and photo model. Mukai's current girlfriend Kozue (Akie Namiki), who's given to hysterical fits, snoops around in Shitara's apartment. When she encounters the battered wife, she initiates a role-play practice to toughen her. As Kozue slaps her face repeatedly, memories of her life with Shitara flood back. The two, it turns out, shared an apartment before. And as they say in every suspense-thriller tagline, nothing is what it seems.
Every character is a well of insecurity, touched by the latent sadomasochistic violence that lurks behind a workaday world. Namiki is especially good at playing a woman of contradictions -- one moment as fragile as eggshells, the next a self-centered aggressor whose mere existence is torture to those around her.
With this film, Takahashi demonstrates that he can at last hold his DV camera without a shaky hand (extreme close-ups scrutinize subjects like a microscope), and that he doesn't have to limit his sets to just one room (now he uses at least three rooms!). But in this case, less is more, and the increase of characters means that some are more developed than others, and the hottest chemistry is still generated by two: Namiki's Kozue and Shin-e's Shitara.
WHAT THE HEART CRAVES (MUSUNDE-HIRAITE)
IMJ Entertainment Corp
Credits:
Director: Izumi Takahashi
Director of photography: Izumi Takahashi, Kengo Nakamura, Hiromasa Hirosue
Music: Junya Mitsui
Cast:
Kozue: Akie Namiki
Shitara: Midori Shin-e
Mukai: Wataru Monbayashi
Kurata: Hiromasa Hirosue
Running time -- 98 minutes
No MPAA rating...
BERLIN -- Substitute navel-gazing with still shots of blood spit into rice or sustained dull stares at the window, and you get a sense of the self-obsessed and punishing neurosis that dominates What the Heart Craves. Making his sophomore feature with the same bargain-basement budget as his award-winning debut, The Soup One Morning, Izumi Takahashi gets extraordinary dramatic mileage out of a hate-triangle of ex- and current lovers/roommates and their entanglement with other characters.
While Takahashi is recognized by critics and arty festivals as an accomplished scriptwriter and alternative directorial talent especially in his partnerships with actor-director Hiromasa Hirosue, few buyers who care for production values and aesthetic quality would put his latest effort in their shopping cart.
At a casual after-party of a wedding reception, Kurata (Hiromasa Hirosue) performs a magic trick with keys. The keys wind up getting swapped, and Kurota goes home with his friend Mukai's key. Mukai gets ex-girlfriend Shitara (Midori Shin-e)'s key, while she ends up with Kurota's. This becomes a carte blanche for each of them to go on a merry-go-round of unannounced house visits.
Shitara discovers that Kurata has been sheltering a neighbor from her abusive husband, and makes the woman her protege and photo model. Mukai's current girlfriend Kozue (Akie Namiki), who's given to hysterical fits, snoops around in Shitara's apartment. When she encounters the battered wife, she initiates a role-play practice to toughen her. As Kozue slaps her face repeatedly, memories of her life with Shitara flood back. The two, it turns out, shared an apartment before. And as they say in every suspense-thriller tagline, nothing is what it seems.
Every character is a well of insecurity, touched by the latent sadomasochistic violence that lurks behind a workaday world. Namiki is especially good at playing a woman of contradictions -- one moment as fragile as eggshells, the next a self-centered aggressor whose mere existence is torture to those around her.
With this film, Takahashi demonstrates that he can at last hold his DV camera without a shaky hand (extreme close-ups scrutinize subjects like a microscope), and that he doesn't have to limit his sets to just one room (now he uses at least three rooms!). But in this case, less is more, and the increase of characters means that some are more developed than others, and the hottest chemistry is still generated by two: Namiki's Kozue and Shin-e's Shitara.
WHAT THE HEART CRAVES (MUSUNDE-HIRAITE)
IMJ Entertainment Corp
Credits:
Director: Izumi Takahashi
Director of photography: Izumi Takahashi, Kengo Nakamura, Hiromasa Hirosue
Music: Junya Mitsui
Cast:
Kozue: Akie Namiki
Shitara: Midori Shin-e
Mukai: Wataru Monbayashi
Kurata: Hiromasa Hirosue
Running time -- 98 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 2/11/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Forum
BERLIN -- Suffused with recollected passions of a bona fide activist, and sober historical hindsight, "United Red Army" transcends its national and historical specificity as an elegy to Seventies idealism, in kindred spirits with Ken Loach's "Land and Freedom" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." Its accounts of the "Mountain Base Incident" and "Asama Lodge Incident" create a celluloid monument to a chapter in Japanese history skipped over in school books. However, at 190 minutes, it is so fanatically faithful in tracing the roots of Japan's left-wing movement and ensuing fractured radicalism, so unflinching in its re-creation of Orwellian internal purging as well as the power hunger and bloodlust that motivates it, that it is a physical and emotional long haul for any viewer.
As the vanguard of Japanese radical cinema and a friend/collaborator of Japanese Red Army member/filmmaker Masao Adachi, there is arguably no one more qualified than Koji Wakamatsu to take the helm. His cult status among European cineastes as a master of pink eiga will no doubt secure that niche market. The film was named best Japanese film at Tokyo International Film Festival.
Structured into three acts, the first charts the rise of the zenkyoutou student movement in 1970, its waning, and splintering into factions. The morass of merged archival and fictional material takes an hour to unfold, and totally swamps the uninformed. However, there are scenes crucial to later dramatic development, such as the activists' inherent violence to each other.
The second act is breathtakingly tense, when two extremist factions merge to become the United Red Army on July 15, 1971. Members undertake military training in a hidden base inside Nagano's mountains. Their initial Boy Scout enthusiasm as they hike and build a log cabin form an ironic prelude to the harrowing Maoist "self-criticism" that escalates from verbal humiliation to bloody beatings and executions with ice picks. The final act and climax is the seizing of a ski resort inn by a few desperado members following the group's disbanding. Their 10-day hold-off is objectively stresses both their politeness to the hostage, and their caged animal madness.
The brittle performance of Akie Namiki, as deputy leader Nagata impersonates a spine-chilling cross between Gang of Four leader Jiang Qing and Mrs. Ceausescu. Go Jibiki's Mori is equally memorable in his cold-blooded brutality and calculation. Wakamatsu eschews the dazzling experimental techniques of his earlier work in favor of a documentarylike and utilitarian style. His mastery of shooting in cramped interiors, alternates with his signature location shooting in single takes and natural lighting create powerful contrasts of the claustrophobia of a torture chamber with the glistening snowy landscape outdoors.
Although the narrative sometimes totters under the weight of its own gravitas, "United Red Army" is a must-see for students and intellectuals.
UNITED RED ARMY (JUTSUROKU RENGO SEKIGUN: ASAMA SANSO E NO MICHI)
Wakamatsu, Skhole Co/Wakamatsu Productions Tokyo
Credits:
Director-Editor: Koji Wakamatsu
Screenwriters: Koji Wakamatsu, Asako Otomo
Producers: Koji Wakamatsu, Noriko Ozaki, Asako Otomo
Director of photography: Tomohiko Tsuji, Yoshihisa Toda
Production designer: Geb Uti
Music: Jim O'Rourke
Cast:
Hiroko Nagata: Akie Namiki
Tsuneo Mori: Go Jibiki
Mieko Toyama: Maki Sakai
Running time 190 minutes
No MPAA rating...
BERLIN -- Suffused with recollected passions of a bona fide activist, and sober historical hindsight, "United Red Army" transcends its national and historical specificity as an elegy to Seventies idealism, in kindred spirits with Ken Loach's "Land and Freedom" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." Its accounts of the "Mountain Base Incident" and "Asama Lodge Incident" create a celluloid monument to a chapter in Japanese history skipped over in school books. However, at 190 minutes, it is so fanatically faithful in tracing the roots of Japan's left-wing movement and ensuing fractured radicalism, so unflinching in its re-creation of Orwellian internal purging as well as the power hunger and bloodlust that motivates it, that it is a physical and emotional long haul for any viewer.
As the vanguard of Japanese radical cinema and a friend/collaborator of Japanese Red Army member/filmmaker Masao Adachi, there is arguably no one more qualified than Koji Wakamatsu to take the helm. His cult status among European cineastes as a master of pink eiga will no doubt secure that niche market. The film was named best Japanese film at Tokyo International Film Festival.
Structured into three acts, the first charts the rise of the zenkyoutou student movement in 1970, its waning, and splintering into factions. The morass of merged archival and fictional material takes an hour to unfold, and totally swamps the uninformed. However, there are scenes crucial to later dramatic development, such as the activists' inherent violence to each other.
The second act is breathtakingly tense, when two extremist factions merge to become the United Red Army on July 15, 1971. Members undertake military training in a hidden base inside Nagano's mountains. Their initial Boy Scout enthusiasm as they hike and build a log cabin form an ironic prelude to the harrowing Maoist "self-criticism" that escalates from verbal humiliation to bloody beatings and executions with ice picks. The final act and climax is the seizing of a ski resort inn by a few desperado members following the group's disbanding. Their 10-day hold-off is objectively stresses both their politeness to the hostage, and their caged animal madness.
The brittle performance of Akie Namiki, as deputy leader Nagata impersonates a spine-chilling cross between Gang of Four leader Jiang Qing and Mrs. Ceausescu. Go Jibiki's Mori is equally memorable in his cold-blooded brutality and calculation. Wakamatsu eschews the dazzling experimental techniques of his earlier work in favor of a documentarylike and utilitarian style. His mastery of shooting in cramped interiors, alternates with his signature location shooting in single takes and natural lighting create powerful contrasts of the claustrophobia of a torture chamber with the glistening snowy landscape outdoors.
Although the narrative sometimes totters under the weight of its own gravitas, "United Red Army" is a must-see for students and intellectuals.
UNITED RED ARMY (JUTSUROKU RENGO SEKIGUN: ASAMA SANSO E NO MICHI)
Wakamatsu, Skhole Co/Wakamatsu Productions Tokyo
Credits:
Director-Editor: Koji Wakamatsu
Screenwriters: Koji Wakamatsu, Asako Otomo
Producers: Koji Wakamatsu, Noriko Ozaki, Asako Otomo
Director of photography: Tomohiko Tsuji, Yoshihisa Toda
Production designer: Geb Uti
Music: Jim O'Rourke
Cast:
Hiroko Nagata: Akie Namiki
Tsuneo Mori: Go Jibiki
Mieko Toyama: Maki Sakai
Running time 190 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 2/10/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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