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Japanese independent directors excel in making eccentric and surrealistic masterpieces and we had quite a lot of that again in 2007 - think The Pavillion “Salamandre”and Deathfix, for example. The best of these maniac excursions into zaniness in 2007 was Dai-Nipponjin, about an eponymous “Great Japanese” who is not so great anymore and has lost all popularity. The film was written, played and directed by Matsumoto Hitoshi, in real life the “dim-witted” half of the highly popular “manzai” comic duo Downtown. This film is his feature debut. It is a cross between a mockumentary and a riff on the giant monster genre - and the result is a fabulously entertaining product.

What is it about
Daisato Masaru (Matsumoto Hitoshi) is a seemingly a middle-aged loser - with dirty long hair, he looks every bit the typical homeless person although he lives in a wooden house - which is again suitably dilapidated and cluttered with junk. Not surprisingly, he is not popular with the neighbors, who paint graffitti on his wallls suggesting him to get lost and every night a stone comes crashing through one of his windows.

The set-up of the film is that Daisato is being interviewed by a TV crew who are making a program about him. They follow him everywhere he goes, in the bus, while shopping and in his house. At first the only remarkable thing about Daisato seems to be his interest in small, folding umbrellas.

That changes when he receives a phone call from the Ministry of Defense and leaves on his old motorbike to a secret assignment. We now learn that he leads a double life as Great Defender of Japan against invading monsters. The whole power of an electrical power plant is necessary to blow him up to giant size, the cables painfully attached to his nipples, and standing in a sort of blue tent that will become his underpants when he grows in size. The result of the electrical shock is a skyscraper-high Hulk with Eraserhead hairstyle, and commercials by the corporate sponsors of the TV program tattoed on his chest. The fights are shown on TV (with nasal radio commentary as from a pre-WWII documentary), but the ratings are almost down to zero and the program is only shown at some ungodly, midnight hour. In this modern age, Dai-Nipponjin is the epitome of uncool, although his ancestors were regarded as national heroes…

What do I like about it

- The deadly serious Matsumoto Hitoshi
The film is of course carried by Matsumoto Hitoshi, who is present in virtually all frames. And he does a great job. As elderly loser in the beginning of the film he appears so deadly serious that you almost fear having erred into a film about the lonely life of the elderly… In contrast to the other wacky films I mentioned above, the humor in Dai-Nipponjin is not broad or gross but very subtle, even subdued, and at times quietly surreallistic. Matsumoto never even smiles, winks or shows this is all a joke and that deadpan seriousness is exactly what makes this film so absurdist.

Matsumoto also plays a typical Japanese “non-verbal” person, someone who does not like to talk much and has to be drawn out all the time by the interviewer. He tells the story of his life almost unwillingly…

- The wacky monsters
This is decidedly not a “monster film,” because these monsters are not of this modern time, either… These kaiju are on purpose done with terrible CGI, to show how old-fashioned they are. The faces of real actors as Takeuchi Riki have been embedded in them. These giant monsters are only funny, and not threatening at all, but they spring from a very fertile imagination, as the “Smelly Baddy” with the deadly farts…

- Conclusion:
This is one lunatic and weird, weird, film…

Links

Official website.

Page about Downtown.

Have you seen Dai-Nipponjin? What did you think about it?