Radiance 光 Dir: Naomi Kawase (2017)

Radiance

光 「Hikari」

Running Time: 129 mins.

Release Date: May 27^th , 2017

Director: Naomi Kawase

Writer: Naomi Kawase (Screenplay),

Starring: Masatoshi Nagase, Ayame Misaki, Tatsuya Fuji, Chihiro Ohtsuka, Kazuko Shirakawa, Saori Koide, Nobumitsu Onishi, Mantaro Koichi,

Website IMDB

Naomi Kawase is one of the “4 Ks”, directors who dominate contemporary Japanese cinema (the others are Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kitano and Kore-eda) and she is a film-maker whose ability to capture sensual experiences makes for transcendent films. This is something which masks the slightness of some of her stories but at the same time it lends them more power. With Radiance she looks at the transcendent nature of film itself and she does so through the realm of using words.

Misako Ozaki (Ayame Misaki) is a woman who is involved in a project providing audio description for films for the visually impaired. She watches films and writes down the best way to describe scenes and characters and then presents them to a panel of people who critique her work so she can tweak it for a wider release. Masaya Nakamori (Masatoshi Nagase) is one of those people on the panel. He is a genius photographer and he has the harshest criticisms. The two initially don’t get on because Masaya has a cold attitude but when Misako sees a photograph of a sunset shot by him, she is inspired to look into Masaya’s life and discovers that he is losing his sight and their relationship changes as she gets to know him.

Vision ビジョン Dir: Naomi Kawase (2018)

Vision    

ビジョン 「Bijon」

Running Time: 110 mins.

Release Date: June 08th, 2018

Director:  Naomi Kawase

Writer: Naomi Kawase (Screenplay),

Starring: Juliette Binoche, Masatoshi Nagase, Min Tanaka, Mari Natsuki, Mirai Moriyama, Minami,

Website    IMDB

Naomi Kawase is a director who translates new age ideas to the screen with ease. Her work evidences an eye for the beauty of the natural world and a knack for getting good performances from her actors. Kawase delivers beautiful paeans to the power of life itself as exemplified here in a story of a French woman who heads to an ancient forest in Japan as she seeks a mysterious herb that can heal many things including, she hopes, an aching pain in her heart.

Sweet Bean あん Dir: Naomi Kawase (2015)

Sweet Bean

An Sweet Red Bean Paste Film Poster

あん 「An」

Release Date: May 30^th, 2015

Running Time: 113 mins.

Director: Naomi Kawase,

Writer: Naomi Kawase (Screenplay), Tetsuya Akikawa (Original Novel),

Starring:  Masatoshi Nagase, Kirin Kiki, Kyara Uchida, Etsuko Ichihara, Miki Mizuno, Taiga, Wakato Kanematsu, Miyoko Asada.

Website   IMDB

Travelling through Japan is an amazing culinary experience because of the sheer amount of restaurants, stores and street food available in shotengai, yokocho and main streets. Everything from big chains to small stores selling a variety of things from tasteless but healthy jelly-like konyaku to the pastry-like manju (the greatest delicacy!!!) all cooked up and served by a variety of people. The most memorable encounters I had were usually old ladies with crooked backs bent from a lifetime of hard work. While they were cooking they would impart some of their experiences and what the food means and these experiences and informed how they cooked and made the food seem more meaningful and tasty than store-bought goods. It is this sort of thing that Naomi Kawase channels in her drama Sweet Bean which is based on a novel by Durian Sukegawa. It tells the tale of a melancholy cake shop owner who rediscovers his joie de vivre after meeting an exceptional person. It marries Kawase’s visual lyricism and penchant for making connections between humans and nature to a simple tale and works well.

Sweet beans, known as an in Japanese, is a wonderfully sweet-tasting thick substance made from adzuki beans and is a filling usually found in confections from doughnuts to the dorayaki as seen in this film. Dorayaki are like pancakes where the batter is poured onto a metal griddle and flipped with a spatula before the sweet bean filling is added.

Yoji Yamada’s “A Class to Remember” Screening at the Japanese Embassy in London on May 23rd

The Japanese embassy in London regularly screens films that are hard to find in the West and they are an eclectic bunch. The latest one programmed is one from the venerable director Yoji Yamada. It’s called A Class to Remember and it’s from the 1996 and was Japan’s submission to the 69^th Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language Film category but it was not accepted as a nominee (source: Wikipedia).

Here’s the information and here’s the link to the embassy’s page:

A Class to Remember 2: The Learning Circle   

学校ＩＩ 「Gakko II」

Running Time: 122 mins.

Release Date: October 19^th , 1996

Director: Yoji Yamada

Writer: Yoji Yamada (Screenplay),

Starring: Toshiyuki Nishida, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Masatoshi Nagase, Ayumi Ishida, Pinko Izumi, Takashi Sasano, Ayumi Hamasaki,

IMDB

Naomi Kawase’s Film Sweat Bean (An) Gets US Theatrical Release

The American film distributor Kino Lorber has set up a series of theatrical screenings for Sweet Bean, the 2015 film from acclaimed director Naomi Kawase. It has had a long journey on the festival circuit starting at Cannes last year and heading to Rotterdam last month. The American release covers some major cities:

Suicide Circle Suicide Club 自殺サークル (2002)

Suicide Circle                                                       

International Title: Suicide Club

Romaji: Jisatsu Sakuru

Japanese Title: 自殺サークル

Release Date: 23^rd June 2002 (Japan)

Running Time: 94 mins.

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Starring: Ryo Ishibashi, Akaji Maro, Masatoshi Nagase, Saya Hagiwara, Hideo Sako, Takashi Nomura, Kimiko Yo, Rolly

Although Sion Sono started making films back in 1987 it was 2002’s Suicide Circle which truly put him on the map with its mix of black humour, social observation, and an audacious opening in which a whole bunch of commuters at Shinjuku station get soaked in a whole lot of gore.

25^th May, Shinjuku Station. The place is packed with commuters waiting to go home. Nobody takes any notice of the fifty-four smiling school girls who gather at edge of a platform as a train approaches until they link hands and jump in front of that train. This is the start of a wave of suicides that strikes Tokyo which coincides with the emergence of a J-Pop group named Dessert. The police are uncertain as to whether this is suicide or an accident but when a mysterious phone call from a hacker named ‘the Bat’ tips off Detective Kuroda (Ryo Ishibashi) about a suspicious website (maru.ne.jp) that tracks the suicides before they actually happen the police begin to investigate.

Sono’s films regularly examine issues surrounding identity in modern Japan. These issues have long been a source of ideas since his earliest films which regularly focussed on outsiders. He usually explores these issues using genre frameworks like comedy (Love Exposure), crime (Cold Fish/Guilty of Romance), and melodrama (Himizu) and sometimes he combines genres, which makes his films wildly unpredictable. Suicide Circle can be counted as his horror picture as we get familiar genre trademarks amidst his exploration of identity and suicide.

Hey let’s all kill ourselves!

One can watch Suicide Circle and exult in the glorious black humour and horror since it features many absurd situations and grisly death scenes with copious amounts of gore and blood splashed around¹ but for Sono the real horror is what drives people to commit suicide and the existential crises that modern people face.