• 火影 (Shadow of Fire)

11/9/23 (Thurs)

The latest overwrought work by provocateur Tsukamoto Shinya. The Foreign Correspondents Club was showing a subtitled version for the overseas press, and free sounded like the right price. That proved optimistic. There was an after-talk by the director (who produces his own films – no one else will), but we opted for dinner instead.

In a poverty-stricken area just after the war, a woman selling her body attracts a shy ex-soldier who is drawn to her not for the sex he has paid for (and never consummates) but the companionship she provides. An orphaned boy who survives by stealing petty goods comes to see what he can pilfer from the woman, but ends up being cared for by the woman and man, who turns out to have been a former teacher, in what briefly becomes a family of sorts. Neither the man nor boy seems able to find real work, and their presence makes it impossible for the woman to ply her trade. Still, they are happy together. However, a loud noise one night sets off the man, who throws the kid out the window and tried to rape the woman. The kid rescues her with a gun he had found on a dead body, forcing the man from the scene and from the story.

The woman urges the boy to get legitimate work helping at the black market, but he is known there as a thief and rejected. As their situation becomes desperate, she throws him out and tells him never to return. He then goes off with a stranger who, having learned that the boy has a gun, offers him money to join him on a job. After a long trek through fields and countryside, the boy’s suspicions become aroused. But they finally arrive at what appears a prosperous home. When the owner emerges, we learn that he was the man’s commander in the war. The man, cursing the owner for ordering him to kill innocents during the conflict, shoots him multiple times, one for each of his friends who suffered the ordeal. As the man celebrates that the war is now finally over, the boy runs off.

The kid returns to the woman, but she has become disfigured due to venereal disease and again ejects him. He goes to the market, where he is initially manhandled by a shopkeeper who has obviously had trouble with him in the past. But the kid’s determination to help by washing dishes wins him over. The boy eventually comes across the father figure from earlier, now dissolute and wasted. The film ends on a distinctly sour note.

I don’t know what the film wants to say other than that war is bad and all that. The story is disjointed: the director sets the ex-soldier up to be a major character, then quickly disposes of him when no longer needed. Then the woman seems the focus, but that shifts eventually to the boy. There are some lapses in editing, such as the jumpy sequence when the woman takes the gun and places it in the can, and the dialogue can be unnatural. It’s not clear why the woman ejects the boy the first time after their relationship has developed to this extent, and the ex-soldier’s behavior simply isn’t credible even in the imaginary world conjured up by Tsukamoto. The murder scene is believable in context and well done, but the setup was labored. The director would have benefited from a dramaturge and a better editor. The claustrophobic feel of the woman’s apartment and black market was well done, but the bleakness of the postwar environment was excessive. It was a very difficult film to get into.

The child was quite good as per the standard for Japanese films, with especially expressive eyes. The single-named Shuri did what she could with the prostitute role, and Moriyama Mirai did nice work in the passing role of the killer. Tsukamoto is a talented actor (he was superb as one of the martyrs in Scorsese’s Silence), but his directorial vision needs reining in significantly. Not recommended.