Yoshishige Yoshida returned to feature filmmaking after a hiatus of thirteen years with this brave and moving film about the struggle to maintain dignity in the face of old age and approaching death. The Human Promise reaffirms Yoshida’s ability to deal with difficult and even taboo topics by exploring the question of euthanasia with a profound sensitivity and subtlety. The film’s unusually frank meditation on death is anchored by the restrained performances by its veteran actors.
Tag: JAPAN
Based on Kimio Yanagisawa’s popular manga, Shinj Sômai’s directorial debut perfectly evokes the pain and joy of adolescence in its depiction of a high school boy and girl who end up sharing a house after a real estate agent’s mistake. Several techniques that came to characterize Sômai’s approach to direction, such as long takes and long shots, are already abundantly evident in this film.
Kumi lives a hippie-like life in Tokyo’s outskirts. One night while drunk she stumbles into an abandoned industrial site, except in addition to deserted factories, it is full of forests and greenery. She decides to move there, even further away from the civilization she had already left.
A jobless young couple, Yoshigi and Tsutue, wind up at the outskirts of the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. Tsutue talks her way into a job pouring sake for male customers at a small bar run by a sympathetic older woman, while Yoshigi is shunted off into a nearby noodle shop, where he gets a job delivering noodles. Tsutue charms and runs off with one of her clients. Yoshigi, ignoring the attentions of a sweet co-worker, pursues Tsutue.
Hymn to a Tired Man uses a flashback narrative to reflect on war and its aftermath. A mild-mannered office worker is driven to recall his past when his son falls in love with the daughter of the commanding officer under whom he served during World War II. Memories of abusive discipline resurface throwing the former soldier’s relatively quiet postwar life into turmoil. Kobayashi offers an unsparing indictment of the lack of accountability for the scars of battle.
Soon after the disparate yet compatible Naoya and Katsuhiro start to settle into a relationship, a slightly unhinged young woman named Asako asks Katsuhiro to father her child. While the couple navigate the implications of this unexpected proposal, they are forced to confront their conflicting understandings of what it means to be gay and in a committed relationship. A landmark work of LGBTQ Japanese cinema by pioneering director Ryosuke Hashiguchi, Hush! humorously and poignantly upends the traditional Japanese genre of the family drama to offer a deeply human story about three people doing their best to be true to themselves.
In her brother’s apartment where he died, Yuki finds a vacuum cleaner with its cord still hooked up to the outlet. She discovers that the circumstances surrounding her brother’s supposed suicide are sketchy at best, yet no one has any answers. When she starts having hallucinations involving his ghost, however, she seeks some psychological help, eventually uncovering some things that she may have wished she’d left covered.
The first of Kawashima’s Daiei Studio collaborations with Wakao centers on the life of a Tokyo geisha named Koen and her relationships with various men. Starting out with no singing or dancing talents, the young, free-spirited Koen is initially eager to please and happy to do what she is told. With time and experience, however, she gradually begins to notice a change in herself and questions what she wants out of life. Played with subtle shifts in emotion, Wakao’s delicate performance earned her the Kinema Junpo Award and Blue Ribbon Award for Best Actress.