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Love Letter (1995)
Slightly better than a TV drama
I watched this movie because I wanted to check out Shunji Iwai, and this was his most rated movie on the site. Not what I was expecting, this film is very commercial, only . Actors are overly made-up, sets are twee. Everyone is supposed to be a mountain climber but there's not one shot of climbing. The plot starts off with a potentially interesting mistaken identity device but its irrelevant to the emotional thrust of the film - which is driven by forced drama and dead loved one exploitation. I get the sense that the lead actress was more of a celebrity than a serious actress. She plays two roles, and strangely I found that she was better in one of them than the other.
Sasameyuki (1983)
A bad, melodramatic adaptation
I will first declare myself a fan of the book. As an adaptation this film is something of a hack job, and taken on its own merits borders on melodrama. The novel has been described as photo-realist and so the affected acting and melodramatic additions of the script are particularly jarring. Further, the sneering, satirical tone that hangs above many scenes implies actual disrespect of the source material. There is almost complete disregard for the characters of the novel, apart from their most basic profiles. The women are rendered feminine stereotypes via almost constant tears (totally absent from the novel), and the men tend to just shout and lust. For some reason the characters are always at each others throats. The portrayal of Yukiko is particularly shallow, and the most bizarre addition of the script is a salacious and thankfully slightly executed romance subplot between Yukiko and Teinnosuke, which seems to serve only to give male audience a sexual object. On the positive side all the technical aspects blah blah
Dohee-ya (2014)
First half good, good performances, worth watching
The performances of the leads were very good. Bae Doo-na was the draw-card for me, and this the most complex character I have seen her play. The lesbian and immigrant worker sub-plots are interesting. The film didn't shy away from the shock and sensation of Doo-hee's self-harm, but empathised with her as well, an admirable combination. The denouement, staying with the chief, away from her father, was what Doo-hee deserved. Too often damaged characters in film are either not given any agency (they are innocent victims), or are not offered any redemption (they are crazy), but this film is not like that.
However, it does spend time in that clichéd territory. The film is boring after the chief gets locked up for child molestation. It was a predictable plot twist, but really not related to the main emotional action of the film. For the most part the film skillfully balanced exploitation of it's sexual themes with real emotional content, but this sensational hijack of the second half meant that when the ending finally came it felt underdeveloped, even though it was the ending the film needed.
Instead of this waste of time, more could have been put into the underdeveloped sub-plots. What there was of these was well done, but there just wasn't enough. The lesbian plot could stand as it is if the film was just shorter, but the illegal immigrant plot was tacked on. The rest of the film needed to fit around it more. I can't imagine how it could have done this, but it would have made for a much more interesting film.
Overall however, this film is well worth seeing.
Han Gong-ju (2013)
Long and disconnected.
Slow, scattered. Some subplot should have been trimmed or cut completely. The fundamental crime is a bit unbelievable, like a home invasion out of a horror movie, and that undermines the tower of disconnected scenes on top. The climax and the ending are rushed.
A well shot and well acted film, but the lead had hardly anything to work with. For all the film's length, we know almost nothing about the main character's life before the incident, which makes it hard to relate to her. Her performance was good but with the languid pace and editing, and the drip feed script, she almost seems blank, but the film just manages to avoid this.
The problem is, the film builds all this emotional weight on a somewhat sensational premise and this kind of trauma requires a treatment more committed to the character. Nobody helps her in the end, not the other characters, but not the director either, or the viewers, who really become voyeurs.
Tomogui (2013)
Sticky, ghostly, dirty and deep
A social fable, about a man who oversteps the community's boundaries and must be removed. But also figuring a shift from a male dominated order to a female dominated one. There is also a complicated theme of inheritance running through it.
The titular backwater is like the subconscious of Japan, where life is dictated by natural forces and inherent urges. Much of the action occurs on the ground of a shrine, the ancient tradition representing at once the community's eternal values and it's constantly shifting roles. So when the emperor dies it may not change much overall but here it has great symbolic resonance or rather is a sign of the cultural shift.
The film was adapted from a novel and seems a little compressed. It is fairly didactic with the characters only just fleshed out. On the other hand, it has a literary complexity and a flowing narrative. The setting is very convincing. Even though it is winter, watching the film it felt like a cool summer night.
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014)
Not bad, kind of aimless
This movie starts off as a quirky, pathetic character study but in the second half veers into a portrait of a mental breakdown. By the end, the main character is wandering around in the snow, hallucinating, ready to die. I think it would have been more consistent if they went with either the light, comic tone or the darker one. (If it was to be the former, they could have changed the story so that she just went on a holiday, rather than stealing the money to go.)
The movie hit a highly affecting note about twice for me. Once when her boss asked her what her plan was and she couldn't answer. And again when she calls her mother for the second time in America and starts crying. But it was sort of too late by then, and the audience persisted in laughing at every little thing the quirky Japanese girl did that was vaguely funny. But it wasn't funny in the end, it was sad. And the ending didn't seem to fit. They needed to develop the plot more, but instead they cut often to sort of nice looking nature or urban documentary which wasn't really related. And the soundtrack was OK but not used well. It would swell into loud noise at various points, but nothing of a corresponding intensity would be happening on film. This might have worked for a mental breakdown movie. But like I said, half the time they are playing her dysfunction for laughs. I suppose a tragic ending would have been a bit underdeveloped considering the mental breakdown plot line was only really sprung on the audience in the last half hour. But the ending that is there...
Well, I think the directors created this pathetic character who they relate to and then the ending is their way, through cinema, of reaching out to her and people like her, misfits. And that was kind of the way the film was advertised, even in a review I read, as a light "power of film" film. But the problem is the film had almost nothing to do with movies.Kumiko watches Fargo and that's it. She doesn't seem to be a big film fan. And she only watches it because she finds it, in probably the best scene, in a cave on the beach. So it is less about film than going crazy really, internalising a narrative from a film that is just reflecting suppressed subconscious urges anyway. Crucially, she believes the film is real, something a film fan would never do, no matter how much they wanted to.
And as a film, this isn't a good of the craft. It's slow and has unnecessary stuff in it and the music isn't edited very meaningfully. And Kumiko hardly says anything the whole time. The actress' performance in the first half is a pretty good picture of social anxiety (more human than Naoko in Norwegian Wood, think) but in the second half she is reduced to saying "Fargo, want go Fargo" over and over. And the problem is it is not really a film about the love of film, because her need for it is pathological about this one film, and yet they obviously wanted to go someway in that direction so it doesn't make it as a film about mental breakdown or psychological escape either because the commitment to that side wasn't there.
But yeah, props to the directors for effort, and evidently caring about humanity.
In this movie they had hot coco and went to a Chinese restaurant with a buffet, which I really wanted to do after watching.
There also seemed to be this little red riding hood theme running through it, but I couldn't say why.