Loft by Kurosawa Kiyoshi has been so vehemently mowed down by various critics, that it takes some courage to write a positive review. Contrary to most others, I found Loft a good Kurosawa movie, not a masterwork, but certainly of solid average level.
It all depends on the expectation with which you sit down for this movie. Kurosawa is not a typical horror director like Shimizu Takashi, his canvas is much broader and artistic, ranging from realistic film (Bright Future) to fantasy (Charisma) to thriller and film noire (Cure). When you sit down to Loft with a sixpack of beer and bag of chips for a nice mummy thrill, you are indeed in for a big disappointment. A cold bath in the lake, so to speak.
Although there are some supernatural elements, I would rather call this a psychological thriller than a horror film. The mummy is not of the Egyptian type, swathed in bandages, but a women fished up from a swamp, whose body has been mummified by natural causes. What is more, we enter a typical, grey Kurosawa-world, and as in Kurosawa's latest film Retribution, the narrative is about how the past keeps haunting us, even if we think we have forgotten certain things we would rather like to bury in oblivion. Kurosawa pictures this in an almost obsessive way.
Reiko (Miki Nakatani), a writer with a writer's block and the nasty recent habit of vomiting black slime (ironically, she keeps on smoking cigarettes), moves to a lonely house in the countryside to find the concentration to write - an arrangement by her editor Kishima. The city may be bleak, but the countryside is even more unwelcoming. Next door stands a ghostly building, belonging to a university, where Professor Yoshioka (Etsushi Toyokawa) lives with the mummy of a woman he has dredged up from a nearby swamp. Why is the professor so interested in this dead body, in a rather unscientific way?
Reiko and Yoshioka get to know each other, but not much happens in typical Kurosawa fashion. It is all about atmosphere, and the atmosphere is great. When students visit the professor, Reiko is asked to take care of the mummy. The mummy seems to be moving occasionally, perhaps there is a message for her, a warning? Sometimes she also sees a young woman, mirrored in windows and glass, or standing suddenly behind her.
The editor proves a creep, at strange moments he comes barging into her bedroom. She finds out that another woman, another writer, has died in the old wooden house before her. Who was the murderer? She falls in love with Yoshioka, but her beloved cannot find release from his past, which in very graphic form rises up from the swamp at the end of the film. The swamp of memory, where the results of bad deeds are kept in mummified form till the end of time.
OK, the mummy should perhaps have kept more quiet, and definitely should not have walked (but this was a warning to Reiko, the other potential victim, so it fits in the story)... Kurosawa uses many stock elements of horror films, such as the breakdown of electricity - but these are not the purpose of the film, neither as the mummy is. He just plays with these conventions, to create a new story, which is about the horror of the mind...
September 17, 2007
September 5, 2007
Clashing Cultures - A Review of Karin Muller's "Japanland"
Japanland contains the year-long Japan-experiences of Karin Muller, an American writer and documentary filmmaker who before starting on this adventure already had walked the Inca Road and hitchhiked through Vietnam. Thanks to the humor and vivid style, reading Japanland is a breeze - it is a most enjoyable book.
As a travel memoir this is of course non-fiction, but Muller sets up her story with a dramatic premise: from her long Judo practice she knows Japanese values as focus, inner strength and harmony, Wa, and she is especially hungry for that last quality as her own life (she tells) is sorely lacking in it. Although she realizes you can't just crack open Japan like a fortune coockie, she decides to give it a try - at the same time planning to perfect her Judo in its land of origin. Besides that, although it is not stressed, it is clear she is also going to take her camera along and make a long documentary film about Japan - it was shown after her stay as a four-hour public television series. Fortunately, via her Judo contacts she is introduced to sixth degree black belt Genji Tanaka, who offers her a room in his house in Fujisawa (near Tokyo).
Her host family consists not only of the genial Mr Tanaka, who in daily life is a corporate director, but also the impeccably proper Mrs. Tanaka (called Yukiko by Muller, although it is strange to call Japanese, especially those higher in status, by their first name), as well as unmarried daughter Junko who works in Tokyo and only comes home to sleep.
That this independent and adventurous woman is the last person to fit into a traditional Japanese household, becomes clear in the first part of the book, where we read about Muller's intercultural tribulations as she tries to adept to life with her Japanese host-family.
Living with a family is different from being a casual tourist, it really puts you with your nose on the values and unspoken assumptions that reign in other cultures. It is, in fact, the best way to really get to know a foreign culture. Muller struggles with the intricacies of Japanese etiquette, and with a liberal dose of wit and self-depreciation relates her triumphs and setbacks - more of the last, because her relation with Mrs Tanaka is inexorably on a downward slope. Indeed, no two people could be farther apart than the tomboyish and somewhat messy Muller, who is used to be very independent, and the rather exacting and conservative Mrs Tanaka. Unfortunately, in the end they fail to meet each other halfway on the cultural bridge.
To succesfully adopt to life in another culture, you do not need to become the other, but you need sensitivity, flexibility and understanding - and the ability not to offend.
The second half of the book consists of a whirlwind of anecdotes gathered during Muller's filmmaking. She now is living in a shared apartment in Osaka, but with another foreigner, not among Japanese anymore. Although she paints a colorful picture of Osaka's gaijin community, she is one step further removed from the 'real' Japan. Her filmmaking, too, is of the touristic, exotic sort: nothing but festivals, geisha and pilgrimages.
Released from the confines of her host family, she does tourist Japan with a vengeance. In the few months she still has, she not only manages to run the whole course of the Shikoku pilgrimage of 1400 kilmetres and 88 temples, but also joins the mountain monks for a ten day festival in northern Dewa mountains, goes crab fishing, travels to a small northern town to see farmers play winter Kabuki, films the Gion and Jidai matsuri's in Kyoto, etc etc. Other people write whole books about the Shikoku pilgrimage alone - Muller is, one feels, too busy filming and traveling to find any spiritual relief on this important temple tour.
And the Japan she goes after when making her film is not the true Japan of today. It is, indeed, as the title of the book (ironically, but inadvertedly so) says, "Japanland," merely a Japanese Disneyworld for tourists. The real Japan is not a country of mountain monks or wild festivals, just as Spain is not a country of flamenco dances and bullfights. The real Japan is the country of the Tanakas, living in a suburban home near Tokyo, encapsulated in their network of human relations.
What about Wa, does Muller find it? At the end of the book she seems to suggest so, but it does not convince. Wa is not a private feeling in Japan (elsewhere in the book Muller demonstrates that she perfectly well knows this), Wa is the ability to be part of a group, to live harmoniously with others, and that is exactly where she failes. True Wa would have been living in harmony with the Tanakas...
As a travel memoir this is of course non-fiction, but Muller sets up her story with a dramatic premise: from her long Judo practice she knows Japanese values as focus, inner strength and harmony, Wa, and she is especially hungry for that last quality as her own life (she tells) is sorely lacking in it. Although she realizes you can't just crack open Japan like a fortune coockie, she decides to give it a try - at the same time planning to perfect her Judo in its land of origin. Besides that, although it is not stressed, it is clear she is also going to take her camera along and make a long documentary film about Japan - it was shown after her stay as a four-hour public television series. Fortunately, via her Judo contacts she is introduced to sixth degree black belt Genji Tanaka, who offers her a room in his house in Fujisawa (near Tokyo).
Her host family consists not only of the genial Mr Tanaka, who in daily life is a corporate director, but also the impeccably proper Mrs. Tanaka (called Yukiko by Muller, although it is strange to call Japanese, especially those higher in status, by their first name), as well as unmarried daughter Junko who works in Tokyo and only comes home to sleep.
That this independent and adventurous woman is the last person to fit into a traditional Japanese household, becomes clear in the first part of the book, where we read about Muller's intercultural tribulations as she tries to adept to life with her Japanese host-family.
Living with a family is different from being a casual tourist, it really puts you with your nose on the values and unspoken assumptions that reign in other cultures. It is, in fact, the best way to really get to know a foreign culture. Muller struggles with the intricacies of Japanese etiquette, and with a liberal dose of wit and self-depreciation relates her triumphs and setbacks - more of the last, because her relation with Mrs Tanaka is inexorably on a downward slope. Indeed, no two people could be farther apart than the tomboyish and somewhat messy Muller, who is used to be very independent, and the rather exacting and conservative Mrs Tanaka. Unfortunately, in the end they fail to meet each other halfway on the cultural bridge.
To succesfully adopt to life in another culture, you do not need to become the other, but you need sensitivity, flexibility and understanding - and the ability not to offend.
The second half of the book consists of a whirlwind of anecdotes gathered during Muller's filmmaking. She now is living in a shared apartment in Osaka, but with another foreigner, not among Japanese anymore. Although she paints a colorful picture of Osaka's gaijin community, she is one step further removed from the 'real' Japan. Her filmmaking, too, is of the touristic, exotic sort: nothing but festivals, geisha and pilgrimages.
Released from the confines of her host family, she does tourist Japan with a vengeance. In the few months she still has, she not only manages to run the whole course of the Shikoku pilgrimage of 1400 kilmetres and 88 temples, but also joins the mountain monks for a ten day festival in northern Dewa mountains, goes crab fishing, travels to a small northern town to see farmers play winter Kabuki, films the Gion and Jidai matsuri's in Kyoto, etc etc. Other people write whole books about the Shikoku pilgrimage alone - Muller is, one feels, too busy filming and traveling to find any spiritual relief on this important temple tour.
And the Japan she goes after when making her film is not the true Japan of today. It is, indeed, as the title of the book (ironically, but inadvertedly so) says, "Japanland," merely a Japanese Disneyworld for tourists. The real Japan is not a country of mountain monks or wild festivals, just as Spain is not a country of flamenco dances and bullfights. The real Japan is the country of the Tanakas, living in a suburban home near Tokyo, encapsulated in their network of human relations.
What about Wa, does Muller find it? At the end of the book she seems to suggest so, but it does not convince. Wa is not a private feeling in Japan (elsewhere in the book Muller demonstrates that she perfectly well knows this), Wa is the ability to be part of a group, to live harmoniously with others, and that is exactly where she failes. True Wa would have been living in harmony with the Tanakas...
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