Rotterdam International
Film Festival

Friday, January 26

Like Locarno, Rotterdam
is heavily weighted with Asian features. Full of brooding yakuza, sword-wielding
wizards, gun-toting lolitas and high voltage avengers, Friday the 26th was Japanese
Day at the Rotterdam Film Festival, featuring 4 exciting films in the Main Programme:
Another Battle by Junji Sakamoto, Battle Royale by Kinji Fukasaku,
Ko-rei by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Gojoe by Sogo Ishii.

Let us begin right
away with Another Battle by Junji Sakamoto, a director who met with international
recognition last year with festival favorite Kao (Face, also screening
at Rotterdam this year), the deeply moving portrait of a runaway criminal woman.
For his tenth film Another Battle, Sakamoto, who once described cinema
as his "favorite weapon", has decided to tread his way into pure yakuza ground,
from a script reworking Kinji Fusakaku's famous Battle Without Honor and
Humanity series. Rather than a ferocious display of destructive violence,
Sakamoto's approach is a broody one, pitching a ragingly idealistic yakuza against
a guileful scheme of power greed.

Full of taut, shadowy
meetings and internal machinations, Another Battle sheds no new light on the
yakuza world, mainly highlighting a saying to be taken from the recent Korean
film Die Bad: "Thugs don't respect ranks anymore when they're after power."
A slight let-down from Kao, Another Battle nevertheless features
a strong cast and one interesting twist to the macho world of yakuza. Questioned
about his undaunted return to man's nighmarish realms after his wonderful incursion
into female dreams, Junji Sakamoto jokingly revealed: "Speaking very frankly,
within the same Toei studio that produced Another Battle, there is an
ongoing series called "Wives of the Yakuza", which is all about women in the
Yakuza world, and I wanted to clearly delineate my film from the women in this
series, so from the screenplay onward, we deliberately eliminated the women!"

One of the directors
who did not eliminate women from his latest film is Kinji Fukasaku. This veteran
of Japanese cinema has had a 60-title career covering all genres: yakuza eiga
(Battle Without Honor and Humanity), historical drama, science fiction
(Virus), fantasy, comedy (Kamata Koshinkyoku), drama (The Geisha
House)... Kinji Fukasaku is revered by both Quentin Tarantino and Oliver
Stone, who wrote in a 1997 Asian Cult Cinema essay: "What a pity that with so
few Japanese films being theatrically distributed today in the States, we're
denied such recent guilty pleasures as Kinji Fukasaku's Chushingura Gaiden
Totsuya Gaiden, an insanely frenetic merging of two classic legends: the
Yotsuya ghost story and the timeless story of the 47 loyal ronin."

Said in a few words,
Battle Royale, Fukasaku's latest film scripted by his son Kenta Fukasaku,
is an amazing survival piece mixing all you've ever seen in the genre before,
from Schoedsack and Cooper's Most Dangerous Game to Mark Lester's Class
of 1984 and Class of 1999. Set in the near future, Japan is collapsing
under unemployment and school violence. The beleaguered government retaliates
with "Battle Royale". Each year, a randomly chosen class is pitted against itself
on an abandoned island in a cruel game of survival. Faced with their doomed
existences, the teenagers run the whole gamut of their instincts, impulses and
revelations, from out-and-out warfare against their kind to the dogged observance
of trust, nobility and love against adversity. Fukasaku does not hesitate to
juxtapose pure explosions of gore and mellow soap-operatic pauses, sometimes
enhanced by gloriously dramatic agonies. Asked several times about the likely
marketing of a video game derived from the film, Fukasaku replied with some
annoyance: "Many young people have come to see the film, it is already a commercial
film, does it need to have merchandising to be more commercial? So far there
are no plans, no projects, no ideas for a video game." Greatly cast as wretched
violence instructor Kitano (!), superstar Takeshi Kitano is one more very good
reason to see the film and relish its most sarcastic moments (the cell-phone
scene is very likely to be adopted by the collective memory of movie-goers worldwide).

Another Japanese
director was in attendance at the screening of Battle Royale, discreetly
seated in the back of the room. Over the past few years, Kiyoshi Kurosawa has
become one of the most appreciated directors over the festival circuit with
films that both explore genre conventions and redefine them through a personal
approach of contemporary social problems. Evertything actually started 3 years
ago at Rotterdam with Cure, a powerful supernatural thriller which helped
unleash a new horror boom throughout Asia. Kiyoshi Kurosawa is at Rotterdam
this year to present Ko-rei, his latest rendering in the horror genre,
a film originally made for television but much sought-after by festivals (it
was first screened at Locarno last year.)

Although Ko-rei
does not compare in quality and intensity with Kurosawa's previous works (mainly
Cure and Charisma), it does have its spooky moments but serves
mainly as one more interesting exploration of couple dysfunction through a spooky
angle. Watch out for Show Aikawa in the brief role of a Shintoist exorcist.
Kurosawa's latest film, due to be released in Japan in February, is a pure horror
film mingling the realm of ghosts and the Internet web. Kurosawa confessed his
intention to give the audience a good fright with that film.

The biggest disappointment
of this J-Day came with Sogo Ishii's Gojoe, a big budget sword epic from
the "cyberpunk" director of such cult films as Crazy Thunder Road, Crazy
Family and Labyrinth of Dreams. Gojoe is the biggest production
so far of Sento Takenori's company Suncent (Hotaru, M/Other),
similar to Korean films Gingko Bed and Bichunmoo, and will be
distributed abroad by Canal + on the basis of an exclusive 25-year distribution
deal. Gojoe is Ishii's first period action fantasy, the mythic fable
of two warriors risking their very beings to restore order and harmony in 12th
century Japan. Though the action and duel scenes are extremely well choreographed,
Gojoe labours under a leaden script that has the vicious effect of defusing
Ishii's aerial, almost "karmic" style of filmmaking.

More rewarding
is Ishii's very latest film, Electric Dragon 80,000 V, a short cyberpunk
fable of two supernatural beings literally possessed by electricity, Electric
Dragon and Thunderbolt Buddha. While the former has to shackle himself to bed
every night to avert "electronic disaster", the latter is in control of the
city's whole electricity, and looks very unfavorably upon Dragon's intruding
power. The high-voltage Tokyo rooftop showdown that ensues is to be compared
with Shinya Tsukamoto's wildest cyberpunk images in Tetsuo and Tetsuo:
Body Hammer. The screening of Electric Dragon was preceded by one
of Ishii's wonderful short films: Master of Shiatsu, where the sensitive
spots of a female body are seen from inside the body and then paralleled with
the heavy traffic avenues of a megalopolis.

Despite the stunning
imagery of most of these 5 films, Japanese Day came as a strange mixture of
excitement and disappointment at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Let us now see
what the imminent K-Day (aka Korean Day) has in store for the audience.

Robin
Gatto

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