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Japan Times
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
‘Rainy Blue': Behind-the-scenes drama tarnishes an intriguing debut
'You never know when it will end,' says 17-year-old Aoi (Asuna Yanagi), as she explains to her homeroom teacher why she's been skipping class to stream classic films at home. 'What's going to end?' her interlocutor asks. 'The streaming period,' she replies, 'and my life.' There's a similar sense of urgency driving 'Rainy Blue' — which, in addition to starring in, Yanagi also wrote, edited and directed. In the production notes, she recalls her determination to make a movie while she was still a teenager. The end result is a rare thing: an adolescent coming-of-age tale whose creator, a high-school student at the time it was filmed, is part of the cohort being depicted. This semi-autobiographical story of cinematic obsession was partially shot at Yanagi's own school in Kumamoto Prefecture. It's also the alma mater of Chishu Ryu, the famed actor best remembered for his work with Yasujiro Ozu. Aoi first encounters the pair's films unwillingly, when she gets ordered to attend a screening at a local cinema as punishment for a transgression at school. Pretty soon she's hooked, becoming a regular moviegoer and the most avid (and only) member of her school's film club. While rummaging through the club room, she finds a battered script titled 'Rainy Blue,' which inspires her to start writing a screenplay of her own. It's certainly more appealing than having to think about life after graduation — a topic that's repeatedly foisted on her by the aforementioned teacher (Ami Chong) and her father (Kenzo Ryu, Chishu's grandson). Cinema offers an escape, as does Aoi's overactive imagination. She starts stalking her classmates in search of creative inspiration, gets a job cleaning the temple where Chishu Ryu was born and befriends an improbably mature student who dresses like he just stepped out of an Ozu film (played by indie filmmaker Hirobumi Watanabe). As Aoi totes her laptop to an assortment of scenic locations, often dressed as a fortune teller (don't ask), it becomes increasingly clear that what we're watching shouldn't be taken at face value. However, it's hard to say how much of it is really taking place inside her head, or how it overlaps with the mysterious script she found at school. The film's (admittedly lovely) denouement leaves a lot of threads dangling. 'Rainy Blue' is an enjoyably scrappy debut, but its release has been overshadowed by a public spat between the film's production committee and some key staff, including Watanabe (who also played a significant behind-the-scenes role). The details of the dispute — which involves claims of copyright infringement and defamation on one side, and allegations of harassment against Watanabe on the other — are too complicated to go into here, though they leave a sour aftertaste. A sequence in which Watanabe plays a cantankerous movie director lands differently, knowing that Yanagi has accused her collaborator of being a bully. The revelation that Watanabe had edited a much longer, 150-minute cut of 'Rainy Blue,' which he claims was crudely reassembled for the theatrical release, also left me wondering about what got chopped. Maybe there's a version of the film that unites its cinephile fantasies, comic digressions and adolescent yearning into a more cohesive whole. The puckish energy and heartfelt emotions of 'Rainy Blue' only get it so far. I just hope that Yanagi's evident love of movies has survived her experience of making one.
New York Times
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language
MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to 'the pathos of things,' or something like 'the beauty of transience,' has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn't usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it's the filmmaker who's gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story's concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving 'empty spaces' in his movies as a means of revealing 'the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.' The country that changed modern culture and design, from A to Z It's hard to think of another filmmaker who produced as vast and influential a body of work using as seemingly limited a box of tools. Between 1927 and 1962, Ozu, who died on his 60th birthday in 1963 from throat cancer, directed 54 films — nearly one for every year he was alive. Over the course of his career, he obsessively simplified his craft, homing in on a few preferred themes and techniques and refining them to such a point that he could be said, from around 1949 onward, to have been continuously remaking the same movie. When he was asked about this in an interview late in his life, Ozu replied, 'I have always said that I only make tofu, because I am a tofu maker.' Even his titles, often indicating the season over which a film unfolds, blend into one another: 'Early Spring,' 'Late Spring,' 'Early Summer,' 'The End of Summer,' 'Late Autumn.' His narratives, too, are often interchangeable. There's typically a middle-to-upper-middle-class Japanese family living in a traditional-style house in the commuter suburbs of Tokyo. The children of the family are grown, either married or of marrying age; the plot concerns when, whether and whom a young female character will wed. But plot in Ozu's films always comes second to composition. This was another of his innovations — Ozu's primary interest was in the meticulous establishment of an onscreen space in which to observe the behavior of characters as they interact in mostly mundane daily situations, up to and including the trimming of toenails. Many critics have defined Ozu's work in terms of the classic Western film techniques he rarely or never employed: flashbacks, dissolves, over-the-shoulder reverse shots. In fact, during the silent era, which in Japan lasted well into the 1930s, Ozu made ample use of all these tools — it was only in the postwar period that he began his radical experiment in winnowing down. He gave his actors precise instructions about the tilt of their heads and the direction of their gaze. He almost always placed the camera at a low angle in relation to the characters, showing them in a full floor-to-ceiling space that's tidily crammed with domestic objects like bottles, teapots and vases. This unconventional angle turns the viewer into an unobtrusive witness, a guest in the home keeping a respectful distance. Explore More Read the editor's letter here. Take a closer look at the covers. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Japan Times
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
‘Kanasando': Heartwarming homecoming inspires a change of heart
Actors playing characters far older and more decrepit than their real-life selves are common enough in film history. Yasujiro Ozu's favored actor Chishu Ryu made a career of it, playing middle-aged fathers from when he was in his 20s. Still, seeing the 51-year-old Tadanobu Asano as the dementia-afflicted dad of an adult daughter in Toshiyuki Teruya's heartwarming 'Kanasando' was a shock. Asano rose to international stardom about two decades ago playing volatile, dangerous characters, a prime example being his psychotic gangster in Takashi Miike's 2001 horror 'Ichi the Killer.' His scheming samurai warlord in the hit FX series 'Shogun' also fits this mold. In his latest feature, Teruya (whose stage name as a comedian and actor is Gori), is only acknowledging the sad fact that dementia can strike even vital types like Asano's character. A former construction company boss living on Iejima island in Okinawa Prefecture, Satoru (Asano) was once a heavy drinker, serial philanderer and possessor of a full head of hair. But when his estranged daughter Mika (Ruka Matsuda) sees him after a gap of seven years, he is in a hospital bed on palliative care and mistakes her for his now dead wife Machiko (Keiko Horiuchi).
