Quote:
The Locarno Film Festival is renowned for showing interesting, unconventional films, favoring fresh, undiscovered talent over established names. The two do occasionally mix: one example is Anthony Hopkins’ directorial debut Slipstream, a stream-of-consciousness satire that competed at the 2007 edition. It didn’t win anything, though: the prestigious Golden Leopard was picked up by Masahiro Kobayashi, who stunned critics and audiences with The Rebirth, a minimalistic character study of rare poignancy.

As well as writing and directing, Kobayashi plays the male lead, while Makiko Watanabe portrays his female co-star. Both characters are nameless, and at the beginning of the movie they are shown as they get interviewed on the same subject: a young girl murdered by one of her schoolmates. The man is the victim’s father, the woman is the perpetrator’s mother; she would like to apologize for what happened, he doesn’t want to hear from her at all. From that point on, those two sorrowful adults go on with their lives, occasionally running into each other while they follow the same boring routine, day after day.

Most filmmakers would show said boredom through a montage, but Kobayashi is not like most directors: his vision of repetitive life consists of showing the same events all the time, making the film a 100-minute succession of a handful of scenes, all alike. Man goes to work, woman goes to work, man has lunch, woman has lunch, man goes home, woman goes home – for the entire duration of the movie, bar the opening and closing interviews, which are also the only spoken parts in the picture. The director’s idea of cinema is one of simplicity, but at the same time it provides unexpected complexity: the absence of dialogue (and music) in the identical sequences that keep appearing in a prearranged order makes the action very straightforward, but in the meantime it leaves a lot of unanswered questions regarding the characters’ thoughts and feelings. If the man refuses to speak to the woman, why does he walk by places where he knows she will appear at a certain time? In fact, why do they keep working in nearby facilities, given that would only worsen the situation?

Kobayashi’s narrative technique is fascinating, but after a while it becomes the film’s primary weakness: on one hand, bringing the audience to the brink of insanity by repeatedly playing the same scenes reflects the effect everyday life has on the protagonists, and therefore his point is proved admirably; on the other, it is a choice that can work only for a limited amount of time – there is a very thin line between “inspired” and “pretentious”, and after 50 minutes Kobayashi gets dangerously close to crossing it, giving the impression that his storytelling device is less of an organic part of the film, and more of a trickery used for its own sake.

In the end, The Rebirth is interesting but also frustrating, a movie that will move and irritate in equal measure. Still, pictures this brave are a rarity nowadays, which is why Kobayashi’s challenging art-house film should be seen: it may feel like it’s going on forever, but hey, isn’t life exactly the same?

701MB | 1h 42m | 624×336 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/3CA6C2482E115FF/rebirth-vh-prod.avi
https://nitro.download/view/4D6028B49B05FFC/rebirth-vh-prod.idx
https://nitro.download/view/C4C8ADFA339BA7D/rebirth-vh-prod.sub

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Masahiro Kobayashi – Ai no yokan aka The Rebirth (2007) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The romantic pretensions of Hollywood to the contrary, love is a very messy business. After all, the other person is a completely separate being, whose independent thoughts, feelings, and experiences cannot be accessed immediately through ESP, whose very actions must always be interpreted through the unreliable filter of subjective impressions. One wonders if we ever really do get to know our lovers.

This becomes an even more pressing issue in contemporary Japan. With a spate of recent crimes prompting some to question whether young Japanese can truly recognize the humanity – the existence even – of other people, a number of recent films, from Aoyama Shinji’s Shady Grove to Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s upcoming Barren Illusion, have taken the romantic couple as the testing ground for exploring human relationships in an age of social crisis.

Suwa Nobuhiro, as the title of his new film, M/Other, indicates, has made relationships with an Other – the contradictory interplay between intimacy and Otherness – a focal point for his filmmaking. While Aoyama and Kurosawa have addressed the issue with films tending towards allegory, Suwa has resolutely maintained a documentary stance.

His debut film, 2/Duo, in fact, traced the rocky relationship between a young man and woman without using a script: Suwa just explained the story outline and let the actors come up with the lines on their own, speaking from their own real feelings. As if to investigate what they were doing, he even “interviewed” their characters on screen.

M/Other, which won the FIPRESCI critics prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, continues this experiment, but in a more powerful and accomplished form.

For a two-and-a-half-hour film, the story is deceptively simple: Tetsuro (Miura Tomokazu), a divorced restauranteur who is living with a designer named Aki (Watanabe Makiko), one day suddenly brings home his son Shunsuke (Takahashi Ryudai). His ex-wife, it turns out, has had a traffic accident and asked him to take care of the boy until she leaves the hospital. But Tetsuro not only failed to consult with Aki beforehand, but afterwards assumed she will take charge of Shunsuke, in spite of her busy work schedule. This creates a rift between the two that eventually prompts Aki to leave.

This is the basic framework of the story, but how it got this way and where it proceeds from there was largely left up to the actors. Suwa’s original plot idea (according to the press materials) was quite different – it focused on the three-way relationship between the man, the woman, and the ex-wife. Thus it was the discussions between the director and the performers, and their improvisations, that produced the story we see. There is no script credit here: all that is given at the end is “Story: Suwa Nobuhiro, Miura Tomokazu, Watanabe Makiko.”

Miura and Watanabe thus have much more of an investment in this film than your average actor, and this is evident on screen. Like the performers in 2/Duo, they don’t necessarily produce the most impressive dialogue, but their sometimes faltering, ineloquent words well-up from inside in a way impossible in a scripted film. What they do is not predetermined: in fact, the ambiguous ending invites the audience to give our input in how things turn out.

To maintain the realistic tone, the camera, manned by Inomoto Masami, a veteran of documentary productions, maintains a distance, shooting the actors in long takes and often in long shots. It is not as emotionally involved as Tamura Masaki’s camera in 2/Duo, but Inomoto’s more polished reticence effectively melds with one of the film’s major concerns: the problem of trying to get to know another person.

Whereas 2/Duo relied on interviews to probe feelings the characters were unwilling to tell to others, M/Other reminds us there are no such easy avenues in real life. The film thus operates on the complicated interplay between what is known and what is not known, what is said and what is not said, what is seen and what is not seen.

Much of this brilliantly revolves around the question of space in this very architectural film. In a case of good fortune, M/Other was shot in a real house constructed in the International Style, with windows almost everywhere – even between rooms. While some rooms offer characters the opportunity to hide, others provide no privacy at all, a spatial characteristic that comes to embody the difficulty Aki faces in this relationship. She wants privacy, a space to work and live on her own, but Tetsuro, especially by bringing in Shunsuke, keeps invading every corner of her life.

While most of his contemporaries try to know the Other in order to confirm the social self, Suwa realizes that in relationships we must also give our others the freedom not to be known. We may demand of our lovers an intimacy like that with our mothers, but they are – and must remain – forever Other.

Reviewed by Aaron Gerow

2.46GB | 2h 22mn | 915×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/0F4F3368C33A695/Mother.1999.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English,French

The post Nobuhiro Suwa – M/Other (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.