Japan
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.It’s an audacious opening, and what promises to be a small-scale personal drama soon expands and takes on epic dimensions. Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura is perfectly cast as Kanji Watanabe, a low-ranking civil servant in a Tokyo town hall who’s spent 30 years "drifting through life" surrounded by colleagues who specialise in passing the buck. In Read more ...
graham.rickson
Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the BFI website as a prelude to watching this restored print of Floating Clouds. Scanlon describes him as "cinema’s greatest pessimist", something that’s hard to disagree with on the basis of this work alone.Floating Clouds, released in 1955, is a dark love story set in the ruins of post-war Tokyo. Hideko Takamine’s Yukiko returns from working in an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Bach’s St John Passion came into the world just three centuries ago, in Leipzig at Easter 1724. This year’s Proms shower of manna from musical heaven continued with a consummately polished, sensitive and – ultimately – very moving birthday performance by Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan.Their profound familiarity with the work, and proficiency in all its idioms, bred not routine slickness but an inward intimacy that serenely bridged the gap between the liturgical rituals of the German Baroque and the music drama of today. For all his historically-informed scholarship (right Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Ryuichi Sakamoto can be heard here, on Opus, surrounded by silence, shuffling at the keyboard, off-mic rustles and tells, recorded in the last year of his life, in September 2022 – he died early in the following year – as he sat to make his final performances.Not in public – there's not even the ghost of an audience here – but at Tokyo's NHK Broadcast Center's 509 Studio, in a solo performance filmed by his son Neo Sora, for which this is the soundtrack. Five decades of film and Yellow Magic music are spread between the two hands of one performer across 88 keys, and it feels like he's playing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s entirely fitting that Jake Adelstein should have a poster for All the President’s Men on the wall of his Tokyo apartment, since it was the filmic apogee of the notion of journalist as superstar. But where Alan J Pakula’s 1976 movie had Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as ace reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, knocking the bottom out of Richard Nixon’s presidency with their coverage of the Watergate scandal, Tokyo Vice tracks the intrepid efforts of expatriate American crime reporter Adelstein to expose the murderous activities of the local yakuza gangs.The series is based on the Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s interesting to discover that sound wasn’t the norm in Japanese cinema until the mid-1930s: the huge cost of investing in pricey new studio technology and equipping scores of rural cinemas with amplification proving prohibitive.Yasujirō Ozu began his directorial career began in 1927 but didn’t make a sound film until 1937, and 1932’s I Was Born, But… is notable for the paucity of surtitles, Ozu telling an emotionally complex story brilliantly using mostly visuals alone. What initially looks like a light comedy about squabbling children becomes something much weightier: in Ozu’s words, “I Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently staged in London, setting the bar high, but it’s a simpler story, a simpler aesthetic and it’s obviously an easier gig to adapt a great film rather than an all-time great film, first winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Waiting for the curtain, I gulped back contradictory thoughts: I was so excited about them getting it right and Read more ...
Saskia Baron
While Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t cast a spell as strongly as his Oscar-winning hit Drive My Car, it is a thought-provoking film well worth seeing for anyone with an interest in ecology or a penchant for subtle thrillers. Hitoshi Omika plays Tamuki, a widowed dad who spends his days looking after his young daughter and doing odd jobs in Mizubiki, a village high in the mountains but only a few hours away from Tokyo. Its rural isolation – deer wander in the woods nearby, drinking water comes from a well – means that life is pretty simple for the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Monster is one of those films that you really shouldn’t read too much about before you see it, and if you are anything like me, you’ll want to watch it all over again when it ends. It’s an intricately told psychological drama that grips from the start; a fire breaks out in a high rise building in an unnamed Japanese town. Neighbours watch from their balconies and gossip about the hostess bar in the building.One of the gawpers from a nearby flat is Saori (Sakura Andô below, last seen in Kore-eda’s Shoplifters). Struggling to balance work and home, Saori is upset when she finds that Minato Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Wim Wenders’ latest narrative film Perfect Days might seem an uncommonly mellow work by the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but it still finds the 78-year-old German director in existentially questing mode.The Oscar-nominated drama, Wenders' biggest box-office success, takes its title from Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and its Zen-like serenity from its protagonist Hirayama (affectingly played by Kōji Yakusho). A kind-hearted, middle-aged bachelor, Hirayama is employed as a cleaner of the architecturally diverse Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Admirers of Hayao Miyazaki will find much to love in The Boy and the Heron, which he has said will be his final feature before retiring from film-making at the age of 82. It’s a beautifully crafted piece of work with all the tropes that admirers of Studio Ghibli have come to love over the years. The film opens with an apocalyptic fire; it’s night, the air raid sirens howl and the skies are filled with flaming fragments. We hear the frantic breathing of a boy, running towards the burning Tokyo hospital where his mother works. It’s 1943, the Pacific War is raging and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This is, by my reckoning at least, the third major London production over the years of Pacific Overtures, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's dazzling curiosity of a show first seen on Broadway in 1976 and reappraised ever since in stagings both large and small both sides of the Atlantic.London first encountered the piece at ENO, of all places, in 1987, and, in 2003, it was done with contrastingly intimacy at the Donmar Warehouse. And whatever else one may say about the new Menier Chocolate Factory revival, Matthew White's production boasts one of the most ravishing sets I've yet come Read more ...