Quotes of the Day
Japan's cultural renaissance has yet to reinvigorate its moribund film industry. Inflated ticket prices, risk-averse studios and disproportionately few movie theaters have helped insure that cinematic stasis. Although Japanese independent films rack up prizes at film festivals and draw crowds at art houses overseas, even the most acclaimed of these rarely show on more than a handful of screens in Tokyo, with the majority released directly to video. But foreign recognition is gradually causing the country to take a closer look at its unheralded talent, and promising young Japanese directors are starting to receive more exposure domestically at independent film festivals such as Tokyo FILMeX, the Pia Film Festival in Tokyo and the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival in Hokkaido. "Japan is brimming over with talent. The place is bubbling with infant Ozus and baby Kurosawas," says noted critic and film historian Donald Richie, referring to directors like Naomi Kawase, the 34-year-old winner of the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 1997 for the film Moe no Suzaku, and Hirokazu Kore-eda.
If a quiet cinematic revolution has already started, its Boston Tea Party, according to Kore-eda, may have been the ramen scene. He was filming August Without Him, an award-winning 1994 documentary that tracks the last year in the life of one of Japan's first AIDS activists. Haggard and in pain but desperate to appear upbeat for the camera, AIDS-ravaged Yutaka Hirata presides over the stove of his tiny room in Tokyo, giving the director and his crew an impromptu cooking show as he prepares his lunch of instant noodles. The moment is classic Kore-eda: unblinking, compassionate, blending social awareness and psychological attentiveness to the point that they become indistinguishable from each other. But moving as the scene was, it also helped convince the young director—a believer in such old-fashioned artistic ideals as the pursuit of truth—to change career tracks. "Subjects in documentaries are always reacting to the camera, so their behavior becomes artificial," Kore-eda says. "I decided that by making a fictional movie using actors, I might be able to get around that."
Compact, courteous and soft-spoken, Kore-eda has the demeanor of someone who's most comfortable letting others do the talking . He projects a trustworthiness that is undercut ever so slightly by his hyperobservant manner; you can't help but be suspicious of someone who is watching you that closely. Says actor Susumu Terajima, who starred in two of Kore-eda's movies as well as in Kakuto and Wild Berries: "At heart, he's still a documentary maker. He's always scrutinizing people, trying to find out the truth about them."
It's that patient attention to detail—no matter how mundane—that gives Kore-eda's films their power. His 1995 debut, Maborosi, tells the story of a young mother who rebuilds her life in a small, coastal town after her husband's mysterious suicide. It won him the Caméra d'Or at Cannes for best new director. His second film, After Life—an affable allegory about a purgatory where the newly deceased choose a favorite memory with which to spend eternity—prompted U.S. movie critic Roger Ebert to write that Kore-eda "has earned the right to be considered with Kurosawa, Bergman and other great humanists of the cinema." Distance, his third film, follows a group of young urbanites who return to the mountainside site of an apocalyptic cult's mass suicide that claimed the lives of their loved ones. Though lacking the lyricism of Maborosi and the whimsicality of After Life, Distance nonetheless managed a nomination for Cannes's Palme d'Or. With its obvious reference to the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the film also marked Kore-eda's return to the social themes that permeated his documentaries.
Kore-eda seeks to impart to his protégés that willingness to tackle relevant subjects. "He's more like a father to me than a teacher," says Iseya, whose Kakuto—a stylish, neon-streaked Slacker for Japan's post-bubble generation—debuted in Tokyo last month. Kore-eda's other pet project, Nishikawa's Wild Berries, is an off-kilter comedy about a dysfunctional, traditional family ravaged by the stresses of contemporary Japanese society. In its better moments Wild Berries is a clever and often cruel satire of Japanese family life. One surprise to those who were expecting the two movies to usher in a school of Kore-eda was their dissimilarity to the mentor's own movies. Kore-eda remarks that he never intended to propagate his own style but simply give young directors a chance that they otherwise would not have had. "It's inordinately hard for young directors to make films in Japan," says Kore-eda. "That's one of the reasons the industry is in such sad shape." Kore-eda is hoping to change that— and reinvent the industry in the process.
- Ilya Garger | Tokyo
- Hirokazu Kore-eda is cultivating Japan's next crop of filmmakers