Inferno (2005)

History (it may be archaeology or anthropology, the subtitles aren’t all that great) student Saeki (Ema Fujisawa) has strange dreams about a young boy that she believes must be connected to an incident in a part of her childhood she has no actual memory of. When she was six or seven years old, she visited family in a small town mostly populated by descendants of some of those families who pretended to convert to Buddhism during the late 16th century’s persecution of Christian missionaries and converted populations in Japan but secretly kept to a form of Christianity.

During the visit, Saeki mysteriously disappeared together with a little boy named Shinichi. Saeki just as mysteriously reappeared again, without any memory of what happened, but Shinichi had never been found, dead or alive.

On her return – the family members have died years ago – Saeki soon encounters disgraced – for some apparently crazy theories the subtitles can’t cope with – archaeologist Hieda (Hiroshi Abe), who is very interested in the area and its traditions. They quickly learn that there’s a hidden hamlet somewhere deep in the mountains whose population has never converted to mainstream Catholicism as the other hidden Christians did once it was possible, and who have some rather peculiar ideas you won’t even find in most collections of apocrypha, particularly about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In their version of the myth, Adam shared his position of being the first man with a certain Jusher, and there were two trees with forbidden fruit: the good old Tree of Knowledge from which Adam – here seduced to it by Jusher instead of Eve – ate, and the Tree of Life, whose fruit gave Jusher and his descendants eternal life but also eternal suffering as well as a decided lack of knowledge.

The people in the curious hamlet, it is said, are descendants of Jusher, and have the mental state of little children.

What this has to do with Saeki’s disappearance years ago, or the fact that children of a certain age in the area are apparently spirited away only to appear sometimes many decades later at the same age they disappeared at, isn’t exactly clear, but there are certainly very curious things happening in rural Japan.

Actually, even having watched Takashi Komatsu’s Inferno – apparently based on a manga by Daijiro Morohishi – I’m still not clear about the whys and wherefores of this aspect of the plot, and how it fits into the heretical Christianity of its concepts.

Until the final act, I actually expected the film to explicitly explain fairy lore to be the basis of Christian ideas about hell and its inhabitants in a more Machenesque way, but it eventually shifts its interest fully onto an alternative form of redemption. Perhaps ill-advisedly, for the material really could have used more room to breathe than the ninety minutes of movie it got, not to speak of a special effects budget that could have better coped with the visionary elements of the climax. Though the very minimalist approach Komatsu takes in the end is actually rather memorable and successful in putting a big idea into a form affordable to the production.

While I’m on the film’s problems – this has all the visual calm of classic J-horror, but doesn’t quite manage to find the visual interest someone like Hideo Nakata would have added to long, long scenes of characters talking ever more complicated exposition at each other. Despite its runtime, this is a very talky movie, but then, much of what happens in the last act needs the film’s concepts and ideas explained in detail to work at all. And it’s really the ideas that shine here: being the kind of guy I am, I’m of course all for the elements of Inferno that treat fairy folklore like a good piece of weird fiction; yet I’m also very fond of the film’s treatment of Christianity as a mythological canon you can play around with. Cultural appropriation can be kind of awesome.

Which is more than enough for me to heartily recommend Inferno. It’s a deeply flawed film, but it is also so very, very interesting and resonates with so many of my interests.

Summer of Ubume (2005)

Original title: Ubume no natsu

Japan in the early 50s. When visiting his former war compatriot, the private detective Enokizu (Hiroshi Abe), writer Sekiguchi (Masatoshi Nagase) stumbles onto a very curious case. A girl named Ryoko Kuonji (Tomoyo Harada) tells the strange tale of the impossible disappearance of her sister’s husband, and a the woman’s now twenty month pregnancy. Enokizu, who has the ability to see other people’s memories, doesn’t want to have anything to do with the case at all, for reasons he isn’t too willing to share with Sekiguchi. Sekiguchi can’t get his mind away from Ryoko and her tale, something about her tale and herself haunts him. Quite literally so, for after their meeting, he starts to fall into trancelike states, in which he encounters the original Chinese version of the yokai known as the Ubume. The Ubume is one of several female spirits accosting passersby with the request to hold her baby (depending on the local version of the Ubume, it may be bad to agree or to disagree), whereas the Chinese original kidnaps children.

Disturbed, Sekiguchi goes to his old school friend, bookseller/Buddhist priest/onmyoji Kyogokudo (Shinichi Tsutsumi). Looking for some kind of help, one supposes, but Kyogokudo has a hard time stopping his endless monologues about the nature of reality or tone down a rudeness that makes Sherlock Holmes look personable. Eventually, both Enokizu and particularly Kyogokudo will become involved in the case too, opening up a sordid tale of secrets of the past Sekiguchi may know more about than he thinks, baby murders, multiple personality disorder, angry mobs, an old family, and other markers of the Japanese Gothic mystery movie.

This adaptation of Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s novel (one of only a few actually translated into a language I understand, so hooray) was directed by Akio Jissoji, a man working in tokusatsu TV, pinku and arthouse films imbuing all with the same sort of deeply personal sensibility and strange sense of humour, as well as the willingness to dig deep into artificial filmmaking techniques. So, obviously, when making a film whose central tenet and several important plot points are based on the subjectivity of perception and memory, he went all out on sometimes alienating filmic techniques, starting the film – more or less – off with Sekiguchi’s visit with the for my tastes pretty insufferable Kyogokudo (who knows everything and is right about everything and never stops talking), not marking the scenes with Ryoko and Enokizu as flashbacks, and from then on never leaving out a single peculiar camera angle, theatrical bit of lighting, and so on and so forth. We are, after all, just seeing our brains’ interpretations of reality and not reality itself. One can find this approach a bit exhausting but it is also admirable in its consequence, for in the end, every visual peculiarity and every visual metaphor actually has meaning and sense here, Jissoji not being weird for the sake of being weird but to let the audience experience the themes of the movie through more than just its plot.

While he’s at it, the director also turns the potboiler-y elements of the book up to eleven, often suggesting a man deconstructing a Japanese Gothic Mystery (that’s indeed a sub-genre one can encounter quite often in Japanese cinema, probably in books as well, but that stuff never seems to get translated into any language I can understand) by overcooking it terribly. Which is somewhat ironic seeing as Kyogoku himself is – at least in the handful of books of his I’ve been able to read - a rather cerebral writer who doesn’t wallow much in the sensationalist elements of his novels but prefers to philosophize for chapters (though his characters would probably say it’s not philosophy but science), demonstrate his admirable knowledge of yokai and uses the extremities of his plots sparsely.

Summer of Ubume is quite the experience to go through, taking the approaches Kon Ichikawa used in his Kosuke Kindaichi mystery adaptations but cranking them up to a degree of controlled insanity.


I appreciate the film a lot, yet even more so I appreciate that this is a piece of art which tries to convince its audience there’s nothing truly strange in the world through a story so strange it borders on the absurd particularly when it rolls out its “natural explanations”. It’s fantastic.

Blue Gender (1999-2000)

Diagnosed with an incurable genetic illness, teenager Yuji, together with a lot of other people suffering from the same illness, is put into hibernation, with the hope to get him out of his freezer again once a cure for his problem has been found.

Yuji probably didn't expect the state of things when he wakes up in 2031. Some anonymous soldiers and a mecha are trying to get Yuji's body out of the facility he has been sleeping in for more than twenty years, but are attacked by a horde of large, insectile creatures. During the course of the fight, the teenager's hibernation sarcophagus is damaged, leading to the boys awakening. It takes him some time to realize that the mecha is not another horrible monster, but is in fact trying to protect him from the creatures. It sure doesn't help that the robot's pilot Marlene is not much of a people person, and doesn't say a word to the shocked boy for quite some time.

Somehow, with the help of a whole squad of mecha and soldiers, Marlene manages to expedite Yuji out of the building. After a bit of back and forth and the second of Yuji's many hissy fits of the show, his rescuers finally bother to explain a bit of what's going on to him. Turns out that Earth has been overrun by these strange, frequently mutating bug things that were for some reason dubbed "Blue", most of humanity has been killed and a few chosen ones have been evacuated onto a space station named "Earth Two". The ruling cabal of the station has for some reason the soldier's don't know about (and, at least if you ask Marlene, don't care about) decided to bring as many of the hibernating "sleepers" into space. Yuji is the only sleeper the squad responsible for the sleepers of Japan has been able to free.

Things do not improve for the soldiers during the next few episodes of the show. Slowly but surely their numbers are whittled down by bug attacks until they even allow Yuji to learn how to pilot a mecha (here called "Attack Shrikes"). He turns out to get surprisingly good at it improbably fast. Various attempts to leave Earth - first via a facility on the open sea, then together with another rescue squad in Korea - fail, until the only choice left is to try to get Yuji somehow to the space port of Baikonur in what once was Russia. By that point, Yuji has learned that the inhabitants of the space station aren't exactly heroes: while they fled to space, they let the surviving humans on Earth to rot, and treat the survivors they meet when on a mission on the planet as completely expendable.

After Korea, what once was a military squad now consists only of Marlene and Yuji. Of course there's romance in the air. Yuji's whiny yet compassionate attitude whittles down the defences Marlene has built in long years of loneliness and trauma, and the boy is sixteen or seventeen. Obviously, the young, and unspoken, love will have to stand more than one test in the future, but its effects are rebuilding Marlene into a much more whole person.

After half of the show's episodes are over, the couple finally reaches Marlene's home, but there, things only become more difficult. The leaders of the place turn out to be space fascists planning to use Yuji and others with the same genetic problem for their own, not exactly humanitarian, purposes, and they don't look too kindly on Marlene's change into an ethical person, either.

On the surface, the anime show Blue Gender is nothing special. Looking at its single elements, one might suspect that the show is a rather artlessly fashioned grab-bag of ideas that were popular in SF/mecha anime at the time of its creation: there's the teenage male hero with hidden powers and an easily aroused libido; the gore-loving giant monsters; the mecha of the real robo variant (sub-genre demi-god Ryosuke Takahashi had a hand in the creation of the show). In the middle of the series, elements of academy shows begin appearing, but also a revolution and the mandatory ecological message. On paper, it's really too much, and too little of it is original, but the show's main script writer Katsumi Hasegawa (who must be one of the nerdiest men on the planet, seeing that he also writes light novels, draws manga and has experience as a suit actor for tokusatsu show as well as "special effects critic", whatever the latter may be) and its director Hiroshi Abe (not the actor) fuse the show's disparate elements so well that they fit quite organically.

There are only a few episodes that don't really work, usually when the middle aged men decide to write about sex as if they themselves were still sixteen, and not just their hero and their presumed audience. For most of the time, though, everything comes together into a coherent and fitting whole and doesn't betray its ideas and characters to the demands of fan service too much. Even when Blue Gender uses stock character types, it knows quite well when to stop using them.

Hasegawa does quite a few clever things in his scripts. While the way the show uses Marlene won't stand up to a strict feminist interpretation (but what does?), it's nice to see a show respect its female lead's competence even after its male lead has found the awesome mecha pilot in himself. It's also nice - and quite surprising - to find a show that doesn't pretend that a woman must give up on her competence to achieve emotional wholeness. In fact, once Marlene has begun to face her own feelings, the show changes from being told through Yuji's perspective to being told from Marlene's - not exactly the kind of narrative strategy you'll find very often in anime or elsewhere.

I also approve of the show's tendency to go into the nasty places (children dying, innocents dying, terrible changes in Yuji etc.) its world suggests without doing it just to be gritty and edgy. Everything unpleasant is a natural consequence of the show's backstory. The same goes for the show's at times melodramatic tone - it's simply appropriate for business like the end of humanity or desperate teenage love.

The only other negative I can find is the very variable quality of the animation. I wouldn't at all be surprised to hear that the show went over budget or over time in its final third, when episodes (especially the second to last one) begin to use the good old technique of using static drawings where they really don't belong.

Still, a bit of shoddiness in the later stages of animation are a price I'm willing to pay for a show that uses its clichés without becoming one.

 

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Chocolate (2008)

Zin (Ammara Siripong) is the lover of a Thai gangster boss (whose name I don't think anybody ever mentions), but also one of his enforcers. When she meets the yakuza Masashi (Hiroshi Abe), the man instantly falls in love with her, or with her scars to be precise.

She doesn't resist his charm very long and the two start an affair. It doesn't take much time for Evil Bad Guy to find out what is happening. He shows himself to be one of the more lenient of his ilk and just throws Zin out of the gang and forces Masashi to leave Thailand forever.

I doubt that he would be so nice if he knew that Zin was pregnant. Her daughter Zen (soon to be played by future action star Yanin "JeeJa" Vismitananda) isn't completely healthy though. The girl suffers from some form of autism.

Zin tries to keep in contact with Masashi, but when Evil Bad Guy and his transvestite main henchie find out about this terrible transgression, they cut off one of her toes.

A few years later, Zin isn't only missing a toe, she is also dying of cancer. Since Thailand doesn't have public healthcare, she is in desperate need of money. Her only income comes from public performances her daughter and her friend Mooma (whom Zin quasi-adopted) make, showing off one of those near-superhuman skills the movies taught me to expect from autistic people - an ability to catch without looking everything that is thrown in her direction.

Alas, they aren't making enough money to keep everyone alive, so when the kids find a list of people who owe Zin money, they promptly try to collect it.

Of course Zin's debtors are all gangsters and assorted low-life and not willing to give their money to the next kid who asks for it. At this point, Zen's second special talent comes in handy. An uncanny ability to imitate other people's movements in combination with a steady diet of Tony Jaa and Bruce Lee movies have made her a very competent fighter.

So, the money fetching business works out well for them, until Evil Bad Guy and his underlings take an interest. After all, he "adopted" Zin's money when he threw her out, and the thrashed tough guys are his tough guys.

 

Prachya Pinkaew (Ong-Bak) strikes again, this time with the avowed goal to make JeeJa Thailand's next big action star export after Tony Jaa. I'm all for it. The last years haven't been kind to women in genre films, who have again mostly been relegated to being victims and eye candy for male viewers, a step in the wrong direction that cries out to be corrected again. JeeJaa looks like an excellent candidate for this kind of project: Her martial arts skills are very convincing and her acting is surprisingly good. If Dustin Hoffman can get an Oscar for the dreaded Rain Man I see no reason why she can't get one for Chocolate.

A talented and charismatic actress alone does not a good film make, of course. Pinkaew has learned from the flaws of his earlier movies, it seems. The plot isn't something to write home about, but it's solid and works well in holding the action together. And directing action scenes has never been one of Pinkaew's problems. He's not doing much new with his "ouch, that must have hurt" style of action, but what he does is very effective and rousing - particularly since his direction style affords us the luxury to actually see what is happening in the action scenes, something that often gets lost through all the jump-cutting and fast-forwarding modern martial arts movies are prone to.

How much you will like Chocolate is based on a single, simple question: how much do you like to see a young woman kicking the crap out of people? And really, what's not to like about that?

 

Technorati-Tags: thai movies,action,martial arts,yanin vismitananda,prachya pinkaew,reviews