Several great Japanese movies have come out in the past year, adding to a recent golden period, so is Japan making the best of the best right now?
Cinema around the world is all about cycles. You’ll see peaks and troughs where a nation is producing stellar work followed by a period of creative lull where they struggle to match up to the heady heights. In America there was a stunning creative period of cinema from 1967 to 1977 that saw the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese rise to the top, just prior to Star Wars ushering in the blockbuster formula, which itself had a golden period through the 80s and 90s.
For Japan, we’ve seen the era of Kurosawa and Ozu in their pomp, which transitioned into a period with a rise in great folk horror, arthouse films and exploitation films. It’s usually easy to know just how well a nation is doing at producing cinema, by how widely it travels around the world. A lull was followed by the J-horror boom but that aside, Japan was also producing incredible gangster films and dramas that harkened back to those halcyon days of Ozu.
In more recent years it felt like Japanese cinema (and indeed TV) was being eclipsed by Korea, who were (and still are) producing incredible films, peaking at the international smash hit Parasite (which won four Oscars no less). Mainstream American cinema is managing to indulge some great established artists and rising indie talents, but there is certainly a lull in quality studio pictures and rising acceptance in almost aggressively average films (the acclaim given to Hit Man for example seemed odd for a film that was okay but instantly forgettable). If a film comes out of America it almost feels like it’s most memorable if it’s been directed by a maverick from overseas (like the unforgettable Poor Things by Yorgos Lanthimos which was an international collaboration).
However, since the success of Drive My Car, it feels like Japan has experienced another boon. Many of the streamers in the West, particularly Amazon and Netflix, are picking up a good amount of Japanese film, anime (perennially popular) and TV series. They’re not merely catering to the domestic audience but making films that have a worldwide appeal, and in the past 12 months with a triple hit of Perfect Days, Godzilla Minus One and Monster, there’s a perfect mix of not just incredible cinema, but varied.
With Hollywood producing a number of bland mega-monster creature features in the past decade, the nation which gave us Godzilla must have sat back scratching their heads. Of course, 2016’s Shin Godzilla was a nice subversion that was still better than the atypical Legendary pictures feature but didn’t quite nail every landing. Step forward, Godzilla Minus One a film that stayed true to the roots of the Kaiju film but also added a layer of nuanced drama belying the genre. Everything about the Legendary films is popcorn, smashy smashy with rote characterisations and drama propping up the action. They’ve been entertaining (particularly 2014’s Godzilla and Godzilla vs Kong) but also utterly disposable.
With Hollywood in a dangerous era of uninspiring over-budgeted blockbusters that aren’t inspiring audiences to venture out to the cinemas, Godzilla Minus One dispels the myth that big event cinema has to cost big bucks. There are certain issues relating to how overworked and underpaid the CGI artists are in Japanese tentpole flicks, but these problems exist in Hollywood at 10 times the budget and everyone needs to do better. What Takashi Yamazaki’s film did was best pretty much every popcorn film the rest of the world has produced in the past five years, maybe going as far back as George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
At just five minutes over the two-hour mark, Godzilla Minus One is also svelte and well-paced, a trait almost every recent blockbuster seems to have forgotten. There’s no lengthy set-up to launch us into a world terrorised by a giant lizard (is Godzilla a lizard? A dino?). The giant creature appears in minutes and the film brilliantly sets up a redemption arc for its lead character. It’s ruthlessly efficient and effective storytelling in an era where many audiences want to shout at the screen, “get the hell on with it!”
The simplest thing that Yamazaki did (he also wrote the screenplay) was to beautifully sketch engaging characters who are in the midst of deep emotional drama and searching for a turning point amidst the fallout after WW2 when the film takes place (it’s set during and after the war). They deal with affecting tragedies and are thrown together by circumstance and Yamazaki allows the drama to build. He allows full arcs and builds nicely to those moments of redemption. We are gripped and invested and that in turn makes the carefully rationed monster mayhem all the more effective…because we actually give two shits.
In terms of all that smashing up, the set pieces pay a nice homage to the original Kaiju films with some classic perspective shots and Yamazaki throws a few variations to the usual go-to set plays we get in most of these films. The finale is another great setup and payoff shot at the salvation moment where the humans have to pull off an intricate plan to perfection to stand a chance. Yamazaki is also happy not to tease in other moments. He’s pretty blunt with just how destructive Godzilla is when he charges himself to unleash his power.
Godzilla Minus One is blockbuster cinema at its finest and only exemplifies that audiences will watch great films if offered to them and not merely accept any old star-driven drivel. In fact, this relates all the way down to the indie genre markets where distributors have a bull-headed obsession with ‘name talent’ but only a small pool of bankable names they think will sell the straight-to-video action film of the week. The vast majority of Western audiences watching and loving Godzilla Minus One will not have seen any of the Japanese cast prior (besides maybe Sakura Ando). Just make a decent film. Simple.
Elsewhere, a beautifully simple and nuanced drama came out of Japan but there’s a caveat. It was directed by Wim Wenders, whose long love affair with Japan continues. This is a guy who makes great human drama not restrained by form or formula who did for German cinema many of the things Ozu did for Japanese. Charming, heartfelt and occasionally quirky stories that slowly lured you into the world of the characters. For Wenders, Perfect Days is a huge return to his best after some years of drifting and producing occasionally good but not great work. For the first time in decades though, he crafts a picture that can be mentioned in the same breath as Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas.
Japanese cinema legend, Koji Yakusho plays a toilet cleaner who lives a solitary but seemingly satisfied existence. He has routines and manages to find beauty in the simple pleasures his life and work afford him but as you expect from such a gifted storyteller as Wenders (co-written by Takuma Takasaki) a repressed longing for more begins to creep in. It’s a beautiful film told with the kind of languid patience that would rarely be afforded to a filmmaker making a production in the West. It does everything a distributor would blindly turn their nose up at. Yet, for the majority of audiences watching it, the film is enthralling. It’s the kind of contemplative cinema Japan has often been adept at producing, from Ozu to more recent masters like Hirozaku Kore-eda.
Speaking of Kore-eda, after a recent sojourn away from home base with The Truth (his first film set away from Japan and not in the language) and Broker (an excellent Korean film starring Song Kang-ho, he returns to craft Monster which of everything out of Japan in the past couple of years, might be the best. This is an absolute master of his art, back to his very best. Sandwiching those aforementioned foreign productions at the other end is Shoplifters, which was also incredible and also starred Sakura Ando (the aforementioned who also appeared in Godzilla Minus One). The human condition and all its moralistic complexities are difficult to bring to life on screen. Western cinema rarely dares to ask questions about its protagonists or test an audience’s will to sympathise with questionable moral choices. That was well evident in Shoplifters and indeed Broker. So much of Kore-eda’s best work also revolves around children and again, he puts forward questions and situations most filmmakers in the West wouldn’t dare.
Monster plays in the Rashomon form, with a story told from multiple points of view begins by pulling us into something approaching a psychological thriller as a young mother tries to hold a school to account after her child is apparently physically assaulted by a teacher. She’s met by evasive teachers and she begins to lose a grip on her composure as an obsession with the truth and recompense grows. The brilliance here is that as we shift to the perspective of the teacher and later to her son, the film arcs into unexpected places. Each perspective is from someone with a differing view on proceedings with their own respective problems and thus are markedly different (this is something many multi-perspective stories often forget).
So few artists capture such compelling human characters like Kore-eda and probably no one draws such incredible performances from young actors either. Soya Kurokawa as Minato, a troubled young boy whose father recently died, is incredible, as is Hinata Hiiragi as Yori, the equally troubled young boy suffering at the hands of bullies. A growing bond between the two is always threatened by circumstance and peer pressure, whilst Minato is also experiencing confusing feelings. Like most of Kore-eda’s best work, it’s a masterclass in subverting expectations and telling compelling stories with interesting characters and easily one of the best films of recent years.
Here’s hoping Japan continues to produce great cinema. What’s your favourite recent film from Japan? Are they producing the best cinema right now? Drop us a comment on our social channels @FlickeringMyth or hit me up @JolliffeProductions…
Tom Jolliffe
