‘Ravens': Tadanobu Asano plays troubled photographer with scapegrace charm

Japan Times

29-03-2025

Japanese films often take photographers as their protagonists. The popularity of photography here as an art and hobby gives filmmakers a large potential audience for a photographer-centered story, be it fictional or biographical. It helps if the subject has some sort of international cachet.
One such person was war photographer Taizo Ichinose, depicted in the Sho Igarashi biopic 'One Step on a Mine, It's All Over' (1999). Tadanobu Asano starred as the intrepid-but-doomed Ichinose, who was killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1973.
In Mark Gill's visually lush, superbly acted 'Ravens,' Asano portrays another real-life photographer, Masahisa Fukase, whose controversial and experimental work was widely exhibited and celebrated before his death in 2012. Though the film traces Fukase's life from his professional beginnings to the accident that ended his career, it is not a straightforward biopic.
A British director and scriptwriter whose one previous feature was a 2017 biopic of the singer Morrissey, Gill subverts the realism of his story by having Fukase interact with a stylized, human-sized raven, voiced by Spanish thespian Jose Luis Ferrer.
Speaking in English and serving as a kind of nemesis, the raven is reminiscent of Ryuk, the feathered shinigami (death god) of the 'Death Note' franchise. At one point, the creature even urges Fukase to kill — a suggestion he resists — but more often delivers portentous pronouncements ('Art illuminates the world') in a hollow voice of doom.
Also undermining Fukase at every turn is his photographer father, played with acerbic authority by Kanji Furutachi (who at 56 is only five years older than Asano). Determined to have his eldest son take over his commercial photography studio in Hokkaido, he constantly berates and belittles the young Fukase for his artistic ambitions and otherwise behaves like the stereotypical stuck-in-his-ways Japanese movie dad. The real mystery is why Fukase keeps coming back home despite the never-ending grief from his father.
More complex and compelling, as well as more central to Fukase's art, is Yoko Wanibe (Kumi Takiuchi), a free spirit who becomes his model and wife, though their marriage is troubled and ends acrimoniously. As played by Takiuchi, who has immersed herself in the character and her milieu to deliver an on-point, finely shaded performance, Wanibe at first performs for Fukase's camera with an inspired abandon.
And though she mocks his pretensions to art, saying he pushes a button 1,000 times to get one good photo, she also finds him amusing and interesting until she tires of what she sees as his monstrous selfishness. She comes to feel she is just an object for his lens — no different from the pigs and ravens he photographs to such acclaim.
Asano plays Fukase with scapegrace charm, interspersed with disturbing flashes of self-destructive madness, but he is also a typical man of his time who regards his wife more as a muse than a woman with a mind and life of her own.
That said, his photographs, as seen in 'Ravens' both in their making and their final form on a gallery wall, still carry a revelatory punch. They capture beauty in ugliness, life in the presence of death (including the photographer's own face as he tries to drown himself) with a unique style and undeniable genius. If Gill's big black bird never made an appearance, Fukase's art would still speak loud and clear.