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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CONFESSIONS [KOKUHAKU] (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Tetsuya Nakashima

FEATURING: Takako Matsu, Yukito Nishii, Kaoru Fujiwara, Ai Hashimoto, Yoshino Kimura,

PLOT: A schoolteacher informs her class that that two of her students are responsible for the death of her daughter, and she has exacted revenge by secretly exposing them to a fatal disease.

still from confessions (2010)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Confessions offers an unusual mix of styles and goals: a brutal revenge thriller, a screed against the inhumanity of Japanese schoolchildren, a dark and twisted mystery, a gentle teen romance, and a meditative drama paced deliberately enough to make jealous, all living side-by-side within the same film. On their own, none reinvent the wheel, but the resulting bouillabaisse is a creation unto itself.

COMMENTS: The very last word spoken in Confessions is “Kidding.” The word is wielded like a dagger to the heart. There have been no jokes told over the preceding 100+ minutes, and even moments of smiles have been laced with cruelty or cynicism. It’s the final opportunity for the movie to make clear its intentions, and this final utterance establishes once and for all that its blood runs ice cold.

That emotional intelligence is no one’s priority is made clear from the film’s opening gambit, in which nearly the entire first act of the movie is given over to a monologue by Ms. Moriguchi, the class teacher. Her raucous class ignores her announcement that this is her last day, and pays little heed to her mentions of her dead child and her dying husband. It’s only when she happens to mention murder that she finally gets their attention; they are intensely focused as she intimates that the culprits are in the room, and her revelation that she has spiked the class milk supply with AIDS-tainted blood sends them into a complete tizzy. It’s all disrespect until the stakes turn selfish, and Moriguchi stays cool and detached the entire time.

Confessions repeats this theme of heartless self-interest throughout: a mother abandons her child to pursue a career. Another is irritated at having to engage with a new teacher following Moriguchi’s departure: “She only cares about her own child, more than for her students.” Students are jealous of the media attention paid to peers who commit murder. Most tellingly, the two students responsible for the girl’s death react in equally selfish but wildly contrasting ways: one becomes feral and wracked with existential doubt, while the other doubles down on a sociopathic mindset, devising a plan to wipe out the entire school. Of course, there’s a dark irony in the later revelation that this homicidal endeavor is actually central to someone else’s vengeful scheme.

The confessions of the title are ostensibly the admissions by each of the major participants in the story concerning their role in the events depicted. But this is mostly a nod to the story’s origins as a novel, and a means of keeping the tale’s many twists and turns concealed—because confession suggests guilt, and that is something none of the characters feel for very long. In fact, Nakashima luxuriates in both the pain and the fury of his protagonists, frequently lingering in the moment through lovingly detailed slow-motion imagery (often accompanied by Radiohead songs to maximize the drama).

Confessions is an effective piece of cinema, but a grim and nasty work. It’s a cousin to the all-the-kids’-fault nihilism of Battle Royale or the nausea-inducing machinations of Oldboy. (The climactic revelation also brought to mind the notoriously bleak South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” which itself has a lofty antecedent in Shakespeare.) It’s a terrifically acted, beautifully rendered world that almost actively discourages revisiting. Not kidding.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Overall, Confessions is a fairly solid, creatively made picture taking a relatively simple narrative, small cast and handful of locations and creating a continuously engaging and interesting film largely through its techniques. That being said, its bloated, confused and downright bizarre plot, coupled by its overextended runtime and curious split, made it somewhat more difficult to fully enjoy.” – William Schofield, Norwich Film Festival       

(This movie was nominated for review by hanul. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Confessions [Blu-ray]

Confessions [Blu-ray]
  • Best Director (Tetsuya Nakashima) of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
  • Best Film of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
  • Best Screenplay of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023)

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Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Soma Santoki, , ,  , Aimyon, , Shōhei Hino, (Japanese); Luca Padovan, , Gemma Chan, , Karen Fukuhara, ,  (English dub)

PLOT: A Japanese boy who has lost his mother during WWII meets a mysterious heron who guides him into a fantastic netherworld where the living and dead co-exist in a bizarre ecosystem.

Still from The Boy and the Heron (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It’s got that otherworldly Miyazaki character design, and enigmatic surprises galore. My high hopes were met in an early scene where the heron conjures a choir of fish and a cloak of frogs; once the protagonist enters the tower, the strangeness doesn’t let up.

COMMENTS: The venerable Hayao Miyazaki may be the only man alive still building new Wonderlands, making animated movies that feel like children’s literature. Disney/Pixar has a clear format: pick a clear theme—high fantasy, the four classical elements, Day of the Dead—add clear villain and clear comic relief, along with a clear moral to nod at. Miyazaki’s stories are psychologically complex and character driven, with bespoke worldbuilding that borrows from nothing but his imagination and the story’s demands. His hand-drawn animations are artistic rather than technically dazzling, and although he directs action nearly as well as his Western peers, his spectacles arise naturally rather than in response to script beats. While perhaps not quite up to the exemplary standard set by Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron is a welcome return to the “big fantasy” genre, and sits comfortably alongside Miyazaki’s best work.

But, it must be said that The Boy and the Heron is oddly paced. The movie spends the first 45 of its 120 minutes in the real world. This drawn-out prologue is not at all unpleasant; we get to know Mahito extremely well, his relationship with his kind but distant father and his polite resentment towards his new stepmother (formerly his aunt). The seven old women who attend on the family at its estate and squabble over rare tobacco provide comic relief; whereas the other characters are drawn naturalistically, these old ladies are kindly caricatures, squat, with trademark features like bulbous red noses or eye-doubling spectacles; their cartoonish co-existence alongside the more elegant characters makes them resemble Snow White‘s seven dwarfs. Most importantly, this section develops Mahito’s relationship with the titular heron. At first, it is a rare and noble bird that takes an unusual interest in the boy. It gradually becomes an annoyance, slowly learning to speak, mocking Mahito while drawing him towards the mysterious sealed tower. The heron’s appearance also grows increasingly grotesque, as he reveals rows of Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (2007)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Hideaki Itô, Yūsuke Iseya, Kōichi Satō, Kaori Momoi, , Masanobu Andô,

PLOT: A nameless gunman rides into a town where two rival gangs of samurai scheme to find and seize a hidden cache of gold.

Still from Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

COMMENTS: A hawk grabs a snake in its talons and flies off into a painted sunset. A man wrapped in a Navajo blanket (Quentin Tarantino) rolls onto his back, shoots the bird out of the sky, catches the snake as it falls, and in one swift motion uses a knife to slit the body and remove a bloody egg from the serpent’s neck. While he’s absorbed in that operation, three Japanese gunslingers get the drop on him. Tarantino, using a fake Western accent, then describes a rivalry between the red Heike and the white Genji clans, as he slips into an even weirder take on a cowpoke with a southern drawl mimicking a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, the nameless man turns the tables on the three interlopers and kills them all, without breaking the egg.

This opening suggests a level of stylized surrealism that Sukiyaki Western Django doesn’t quite maintain. Tarantino’s character is not the non sequitur narrator he initially appears to be, and the rest of the movie generally takes a more straightforward tone. Essentially, it’s a series of spaghetti Western archetypes, clichés, and homages—a Man with No Name, a hidden cache of treasure, a weapon stashed in a coffin—wrapped in a gimmick: the action all takes place in a mythical version of feudal Japan where desperadoes pack both six-shooters and katanas. In the strangest directorial decision, the Japanese cast delivers their cowboy dialogue (“you gonna come at me… or whistle ‘Dixie’?”) entirely in heavily accented English (learned phonetically, in most cases).  Because the actors’ English pronunciation ranges from passable to difficult to understand to nearly incomprehensible, this odd, distancing choice will be an insurmountable barrier for some.

If you can clear the dialogue bar, the rest of Sukiyaki‘s recipe will be familiar to Miike fans: fast-paced action, absurd comic violence, heavy doses of morphing style, and throwaway bits of surrealism. Holes are blown through torsos, through which crossbow bolts are then fired; bright flashback scenes are graded toward the extreme yellow and green ends of the spectrum; babies are found curled up in hybridized roses. We also learn that, in old West saloons, samurai were fond of interpretive dance performances scored to didgeridoos. All this nonsense leads to a heart-pounding, if hackneyed, finale that proves the old maxim that the more important a character is to the plot, the more bullets they can take without dying. After the gunsmoke clears from the village-sized battlefield, a silly closing epilogue will make Spaghetti Western fans groan.

Tarantino’s involvement in Sukiyaki is a testament to the mutual admiration between he and Miike, and it’s noteworthy that his role here comes five years before his own revisionist take on Spaghetti Westerns in 2012’s Django Unchained. As for Miike, in some ways Sukiyaki marks the beginning of the winding down of his weird movie period; his next major work seen in the West was the excellent but entirely realistic Thirteen Assassins (2010), and since 2015 has been spending more time on Japanese television series aimed at elementary school girls than on making weird cinema.

In 2020, MVD visual released Sukiyaki Western Django on Blu-ray for the first time (in the North American market). All of the extras—a 50-minute “making of” featurette, six minutes of deleted scenes, and a series of clips and promos—are also found on the 2008 DVD. The one thing that makes this release special is the inclusion of the extended cut that played at the Venice Film Festival and in Japanese theaters. The box cover claims this extended cut is 159:57 minutes long—a typo for 1:59:57, as the cut clocks in at almost exactly two hours. There are no significant differences between the two versions; Miike simply snipped away insignificant bits from many once-longer scenes, resulting in a shorter, faster-paced, and improved film. (A detalied list of the differences can be found at the always-excellent movie-censorship.com).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…utterly deranged homage to westerns all’italia… dialogue is delivered in phonetic English so weirdly cadenced that self-conciously cliched lines like ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ approach surreal poetry.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

Sukiyaki Western Django: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Sukiyaki Western Django: Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
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