• ある男 (A Man)

11/26/22 (Sun)

Ishikawa Kei’s multi-tiered exploration of identity. Rie (Ando Sakura), traumatized after losing her youngest child and divorcing her husband, has moved back with her small son to her hometown in Kyushu, where she works in the family’s stationery store. She comes to know a shy young customer named Daisuke (Kubota Masataka), who gradually opens up to her after showing her his sketches. Now working as a lumberjack, Daisuke tells her that he comes from a family that runs a well known inn in Ikaho Hot Springs (great place) not far from Tokyo. They fall in love, marry and have a child of their own, and he proves a wonderful husband and father. Some time later, however, tragedy strikes when Daisuke is killed in a work accident. That shock hardly prepares Rie for the next one: at his memorial service a year later, she is visited by Daisuke’s older brother, who upon seeing the dead man’s photo on the altar, reveals that the person in the photo is not in fact Daisuke – that is, Rie’s late husband was not who he pretended to be. Rie, stunned, asks her lawyer, Kido (Tsumabuki Satoshi), to find out just who it was she married.

At that point, the film shifts gears as Kido, a zainichi or Japanese of Korean heritage, has issues of his own. As he works to unravel the mystery, his own troubles run on a parallel track: we learn gradually that the man who Kido calls Mr. X had been tainted in society by the sins of his father, a convicted murderer, and took on several new identities in an effort to erase his past, while Kido discovers despite taking a Japanese name and nationality that he can’t escape his background either, including insults from his own father-in-law and even a convict in prison. He discovers further that his wife, who seems on the surface a loving wife and mother, has secrets of her own (hinted at in her numerous late nights out). He says nothing, but a brief scene at the end suggests that he himself is tempted to seek a new identity.

The film seems to be biting off more than it can chew with its various plot lines. It starts promisingly with a focus on Rie, whose story is personalized and involving. She is the one most affected by her late husband’s deceit, and it is her reaction that we are most interested in. The question of identity even reaches her middle-school son, who is upset to learn that having changed his name from his birth father to his mother and then to his new father, he will now have to change it again since Daisuke was never really his dad. We gradually come to learn the situation behind Mr. X’s actions, and the thread ends satisfyingly with Rie’s realization that what mattered was the man that she knew and loved, not the man he was running from, i.e., she defines him by what he is rather than what he was.

The problem is what comes in between. While Kido is not an unattractive character, especially as played by the always excellent Tsumabuki, the zainichi sideline is simply unconvincing and hammered home too overtly. How the convict could instantly identify Japan-born-and-bred Kido as zainichi is unclear, and his outbursts as presented here were just dumb. Worse, the imaginary massive anti-Korean riots that Kido watches on television were not credible whatsoever in this day and age. Certainly zainichi residents have experienced serious problems in the past, including massacres after a major Tokyo earthquake a century ago, and may continue to face discrimination to some extent. However, the level of outright chauvinism in the film felt exaggerated for effect and, worse, muddled the story. (An indicator of the current status of zainichi was the death the next day of film director Sai Yoichi, whose zainichi heritage didn’t prevent him from leading the Director’s Guild of Japan for years.) The idea of being held responsible for one’s immutable characteristics or family history is a potent theme, but the director’s over-eagerness to make his point becomes tiresome. That was all the more disappointing after his beautiful treatment of the mother’s story. There are also too many coincidences in the mechanics of the plot to take seriously, and the scenes dealing with Daisuke’s boxing days, though well done, were overextended. It all might have worked better in the source novel. (In the novel, one of Mr. X’s four identities throughout the story is a yakuza’s son, which the film wisely avoids going into. The book also apparently depicts the real Daisuke’s life in some detail, whereas the film holds back from explaining why he agreed to exchange identities with Mr. X, showing him only briefly toward the end.)

The film makes interesting use of the well known Magritte painting “Not To Be Reproduced” where a man is looking into a mirror only to see the back of his own head – not only can we not identify him, he cannot identify himself. Mr. X of course “reproduces” himself several times throughout his life in an ironic twist on the painting’s title. A key plot device also makes reference to another painting by the artist, “The Pleasure Principle”, where a man’s face is obscured by a blinding light.

There’s certainly no faulting the acting, especially among the principals. Tsumabuki, Ando (Shoplifters) and Kubota did stellar work, all keeping their complicated emotions largely in check in a subtle and effective approach. There was real chemistry in particular between the latter two, and their courtship was the film’s most charming sequence. Ando was also terrific in the scene where she learns that her husband was someone else entirely. The film raises fascinating questions and is worth seeing, but its ambitions, however admirable, get the better of it.