This afternoon I headed down to Asahi Hall in the Yurakuchô Mullion for the Japanese premiere of director Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Retribution (Sakebi, 『叫』) at TOKYO FILMeX (scroll down). The picture above is of the pre-screening stage greeting, with Kurosawa and star Yakusho Kôji on hand to say a few words.
As you know, Retribution had its world premiere at this year's Venice Film Festival in the Out Of Competition - Midnight programme (pictures here). Veteran film critic Derek Elley wrote about the film here, so I won't recap the plot, but some random thoughts...
In short, I liked it a good deal more than Loft (see my Sept. 10 entry). While I'm still not sure of that film's intentions (some see elements of parody), Retribution is more "straight up" Kurosawa, and potent. In the opening stage greeting, Kurosawa described the film as a direct confrontation between Yakusho Kôji and a ghost, and that it is.
The idea of a cop slowly suspecting himself to be a serial killer is interesting, but it's a bit more than that, with a series of similar murders connected in an unpredictable way. And the floating, red-coated ghost (Hazuki Riona) is not vengeful because someone killed her, but because nobody... I won't spoil it.
One key line of dialogue in the film courtesy of Konishi Manami (Udon), who plays Yakusho's not-quite-there girlfriend, is that "Past is all an illusion," and the film asks what happens when that mirage becomes real.
Odagiri Joe (and his hair, fairly conservative this time out), plays a police quack who Yakusho uses as a sounding board for his mounting paranoia. Kase Ryô also pops up as a Charon-like character who gives Yakusho a boat ride to an incredibly creepy, blackened bunker-like building left behind after all of Tokyo's waterfront transformation. One thing Elley didn't touch on in the review and which is an important thread in the film is the way urban development erases the past -- Tokyo being perhaps the best example in the world. The film's recurring earthquakes increase in intensity as the sense of dread grows. Kurosawa talked about this more during the Q&A (see below). As Yakusho said on stage, "It's not just a horror film, but a scary, Kurosawa Kiyoshi film."
My favourite image in the film is incredibly simple, but one I hadn't seen before -- the surface of water (puddles, basins etc.) vibrating with the silenced screams of its drowned victims. Brilliant! There's also an excellent sequence involving a mirror. Kurosawa is really becoming the modern master of using glass and reflections.
Finally, the titular scream (the meaning of "sakebi") is by far the loudest and most ear-splitting I've ever heard in a film, taking the crown from the opening screech of one of my favourite movies of all time, Metal Skin.
Kurosawa is a friend of FILMeX (see my Sept. 28 entry) and graced fans with a Q&A after the screening -- one that was unfortunately too short (not his fault). Industrious beaver Don Brown over at Ryuganji recorded it on video and has it up on his site, with built-in interpretation from one of the best there is, Fujioka Asako, who I've worked on and off with since the early 00s.
After the screening there was a Sakebi reception at Hana -- a nice restaurant in Yurakuchô I had been to once before. Thanks to FILMeX, Xanadeux, Avex and TBS.
Update: Check out Pymmik's informative shrine to Yakusho Kôji here (he linked to this piece in the news section.) Also, for posterity here's Twitch's review of the film after it screened at Toronto After Dark.
I ended the night with recently departed Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmid's Shadow of Angels. I like my share of pretentious cinema, but this tale of whores and rich Jewish benefactors in post-Holocaust Germany was off the scales. If anybody can direct me to an essay that explains what it all means...por favor. Fassbinder was amusing as a "you have to be cruel to be kind" pimp.
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