There’s an air of lofty criticism drifting through Rebecca Miller’s new film that feels at odds with its production design. Though the decor of the sunny, expansive Brooklyn flats where it’s set convey the kind of aspirational fantasy evident in all of Woody Allen’s work, it mainly seems to be a wry comment on what passes for intellectual bohemianism these days. The protagonist is, of all things, a blocked opera composer. Steven (Peter Dinklage) is obviously successful since he lives in these expensive digs with his wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), a therapist who met Steven when he was a patient, and Anne’s 18-year-old son, Julian (Evan Ellison), from a previous relationship. Given Steven’s present professional predicament, it would appear that Anne’s ministrations haven’t been successful, but now she seems to be his agent, an angle that Miller should have explored more thoroughly for its humorous potential. In fact, what this putative romantic comedy really lacks is comedy. Instead, it tries to deliver pointed irony, which isn’t the same thing. One of the running jokes is that Steven calls Anne “Doc.”
The romance component comes in the form of Katrina (Marisa Tomei), a barge pilot whom Steven meets while walking his French bulldog and stopping into a deserted bar for a pre-noon drink. They strike up a conversation and Katrina invites Steven back to her vessel, docked conveniently nearby, where they have sex after Katrina explains that she’s a “romance addict,” a condition that prods her to stalk men with whom she has casual dalliances. This intelligence spooks, intrigues, and inspires Steven all at once. As a result, he has the subject of his next opera. Again, the comic potential in the idea of a blocked creative type becoming newly provoked to make a great work isn’t fully exploited. You get the feel for the material’s potential when one of Steven’s financial patrons raves about the new work as “a female Sweeney Todd,” since Steven plays up the more troubling aspect of his one-afternoon stand with Katrina and blows it up into full-on murderous psychosis. But the element of the story that Miller seems more concerned with is the conventional one—how to keep this brief affair a secret from Anne, who, as it turns out, has her own psychological demons to deal with, not to mention Julian and his under-18 girlfriend, Tereza (Harlow Jane), whose immigrant mother (Joanna Kulig) is Anne and Steven’s housekeeper and whose step-father (Brian D’Arcy James) is a conservative firebrand who accuses Julian of statutory rape. In contrast to this subplot, Steven’s extramarital fling feels insubstantial, and yet Miller insists on elaborating it to lengths it doesn’t warrant.
Even when Katrina finds out that she is not only the muse of Steven’s new opera but its lead character, things become really tricky, not just for Steven but for Miller, too. I can’t say I completely understood the point of where it all leads, but the final joke at Patricia’s expense—worthy of Allen in his pre-Annie Hall days—is the only one I laughed at. It’s easy to imagine Miller coming up with this joke first and then working backwards, which I would say is not the wisest strategy when writing a comedy.
Opens April 5 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).
Celine Song’s debut feature, which didn’t win any Oscars despite being the most acclaimed indie movie of 2023 in the U.S., may be the purest cinematic distillation of the Korean emigrant experience, even more so than Minari. Centered on a woman whose family moved from Seoul to Canada when she was twelve, the film explores the sense of connection with the past that fades over time only to be pulled back into emotional purview when a figure from that past returns. Nora (Greta Lee), a playwright living in New York with her white novelist husband, stumbles upon her first girlhood crush from Seoul, Hae-Sung (Teo Yoo), as he seeks her out online, and they embark on a long-distance Skype relationship that eventually becomes overwhelming, at least for Nora. Years later, Hae-sung comes to visit her after breaking up with his girlfriend, and the encounter is as fraught as an overloaded container ship. I’ve seen the movie twice, the first time in South Korea with a Korean audience, which was educational. “There but for the grace of God,” everyone seemed to be moaning during the quiet, devastating climax.
The second time I concentrated more on the plotting and was perplexed by the details of the various interactions, which felt calculated without being complete. Nora’s parents are both artists, and their move to Toronto for professional reasons was never explained satisfactorily. (In interviews, Song admits that the story is based very much on her own history.) Consequently, Nora’s success as a writer, while hardly phenomenal, seems preordained, and when she meets her future husband, Arthur (John Magaro), at a writers’ workshop, it all comes down to chemistry. Song understands how such a marriage might appear to others, and makes it the point of the opening scene, which depicts Nora, Arthur, and Hae-sung in a bar together near the end of the story. Since Arthur doesn’t understand Korean and Hae-sung’s English is barely passable, Nora can control the separate conversations but is basically frank about her feelings when talking to either man. This is where Past Lives comes into its own as a study of intimate interaction. Though much has been made of the philosophical dimension of Nora’s approach to Hae-sung’s attentions, her marriage appears to fulfill her practical needs, something she doesn’t take for granted. Romantic love, in fact, isn’t a primary motivator, which may confuse viewers expecting a conventional melodrama; it’s more of a struggle between the unavoidable pull of nostalgia (or “inyun,” a very specific Buddhist term that describes how past lives affects one’s present one) and the more natural push of connubial comfort. What I wished Song had interrogated more closely was Nora’s and Arthur’s relationship as fellow writers, since they seem to be at least partly in competition with each other. (Arthur, upon hearing the background of his wife’s relationship to Hae-sung, remarks that it’s a “great story,” as if he wished he could write it himself.) As it stands, Nora skillfully keeps the two vectors running in parallel, so they never truly intersect, even in that very moving last scene.
Song keeps the tone melancholy and autumnal (even if it seems to take place in early summer), making Past Lives one of the best New York movies of recent memory: These conversations, these feelings could never have been generated in any other place. In comparison, the early scenes in Seoul feel tentative, as if the crew weren’t sure they were even allowed to film here. There’s a lot to appreciate, but I suspect there’s more to the story than meets the eye and ear.
In English and Korean. Opens April 5 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
There’s a scene about halfway through this disturbing but frustrating Icelandic film that puts everything before and after in such plain perspective that it threatens to upend the whole meaning of the production. A young Danish clergyman, Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), charged with building a church in a remote village on the Iceland coast in the late 1800s, is talking to his host, Carl (Jacob Lohmann), a fellow Dane and the nominal leader of the village, about the arduous journey the priest and his entourage of locals experienced in order to reach the village, a journey that claimed the life of at least one man and several pack animals. Carl asks, with genuine curiosity, why Lucas chose to sail to the opposite end of the island country and then travel on foot and horseback for weeks through forbidding terrain when he could have more easily sailed directly from Denmark to the village. Though we already know Lucas’s answer (“I want to get to know the country,” is how he explained it to his superior back in Denmark), the stark logic of Carl’s question injects another one into the viewer’s head: Why did the movie’s director, Hylnur Pálmason, put his protagonist through such hell based on such a flimsy rationale? Obviously, because he wanted to test the man, and show off Iceland’s unique landscape in the process.
There’s no getting around the effectiveness of this plot device—much of the first half of Godland (a purposefully ironic title) is a cinematic essay in how a natural environment can be at once monumentally beautiful and mortally terrifying—but given how the trip changes Lucas, whose religious piety is a manifestation of his privileged arrogance, the calculation on Pálmason’s part feels equally arrogant. The director compounds this connection by affecting ethnographic documentary qualities, such as a 4:3 aspect ratio and occasional scratches on a non-existent film surface. The analog between Lucas and Pálmason is further enhanced by the former’s avocation, photography, which necessitates the portage of a huge box camera, not to mention a crate of glass plates, over mountains and through raging rivers, just so that he can record the virgin country, usually with a local stevedore hired for the journey adding the human dimension. But the first inkling of Jacob’s overall attitude toward his fellow humans is his petulant reluctance to learn Icelandic (there are apparently as many ways to say “shut up” as there are words for “rain”), a trait that annoys his guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), a burly, older man of endless resource whose temperament is to question the existence of anything he can’t see, smell, touch, or hear—like God. Though Ragnar saves Jacob’s life, after they arrive at their destination and he supervises the building of a church he would never attend, the enmity between the two men only becomes more intense.
Pálmason’s narrative style is elliptical, so when Carl’s two daughters show up on screen without introduction it takes a few scenes to establish not only their relationship to each other, but their meaning within the story. The younger girl, Ida (Ida Mekkin Hlynsdóttir, the director’s daughter), exudes a weirdly cosmopolitan sensibility in the way she addresses Jacob about the religious versus the secular life, and while she does it to gauge his compatibility as a mate for her older sister, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), it’s obvious that such a match would never go over with Carl, who tolerates Jacob’s seething resentment of everything this place represents simply because he has to keep the village together—religion is something the Danish expats feel they need. But none of this melodramatic business gets at the heart of the hatred between Jacob and Ragnar, which is elemental under such circumstances, and by the time their conflict reaches its violent resolution you may wonder why, just as with Jacob’s preferred sea route, the movie couldn’t have gotten to where it was going with less fuss.
In Danish and Icelandic. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
Oh Seyeon’s Fanatic is definitely a student project, since she was still studying film at university when it was first shown at Korean film festivals in 2021. As such it’s also a deeply personal film. Oh explores the mystery of fandom, especially the downside, and takes off from her own adolescent crush on a K-pop singer who was eventually arrested and tried for gang rape and distributing videos of his victims. An air of embarrassed amateurness pervades the documentary, even if Oh, having already tasted the limelight as a fan, seems confident in her ability to hold your attention.
That literal 15 minutes of fame when she met her idol, Jung Joon-young, in person at a fan event broadcast on TV, is the centerpiece of the film since it not only describes the depth of her devotion, but made it possible for her later to reach out to other fans who came to know her by reputation. She interviews a dozen young women, both Jung fans and some who had crushes on other stars. What they all have in common is that their idols eventually disappointed them, either through criminal activity or scandal. Predictably, their enmity became as fierce as their adoration had been. “I want him to die in jail,” one woman, hiding beneath a hoodie, says of Jung after he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Despite the fact that Oh herself professes to only being able to talk frankly about it while drunk, she’s philosophical about her feelings, as are almost all her interlocutors, who are self-aware enough to probe their own fanaticism. The defensiveness of hardcore K-pop fans is well-known, but for some reason Oh doesn’t go into that aspect of the matter, maybe because from her perspective defensiveness is more or less natural, but as a reformed seongdeok (fanatic) she certainly knows how it feels, and at one point makes the connection between rabid K-pop fandom and right wing politics by visiting a rally for the release of imprisoned former president Park Geun-hye, where one of the activities was writing fan letters to Park that the organizers would deliver to her. As someone who has had a lot of experience penning sweet meaningless love notes to someone she doesn’t know personally, Oh felt as if she were among comrades, despite the fact that most were old enough to be her grandparents and she didn’t have any particular feelings about Park.
She also avoids the elephant in the room, especially with regard to K-pop, which is that most stars are manufactured, their whole public existence built on cultivating devotees like Oh. One of the women Oh interviews had a crush not on a K-pop star but on an indie rock artist, which would seem to contradict Oh’s thesis, since indie artists are, by definition, self-made. But the woman didn’t sound any less disciplined in her devotion than the K-pop fans did, and was similarly destroyed when the artist she followed was brought down by scandal. It also would have been interesting had Oh interviewed some men, but maybe their own brand of fandom scans differently than women’s.
Thankfully, Oh doesn’t take herself seriously, even if her movie is formally meticulous. At least half her production budget was apparently spent on taking the train from Busan, where she’s from, to Seoul in order to attend Jung’s trial, which like any function related to K-pop “sold out” in 5 minutes. (It’s implied that she got into the courtroom by paying a scalper.) She also interviews her mother about her own feelings regarding an actor she idolized who similarly ended his career in disgrace. The parallels with her daughter’s situation are both sobering and hilarious, and when Oh asks her if she was worried about her daughter’s obsession with Jung, the mother says, “No. I thought it was good that you stuck to one thing for so long.” Let’s hope she sticks to filmmaking with the same dedication.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
Veteran documentarian Laura Poitras has years of experience on Oh, not to mention an Oscar, and her award-winning All the Beauty and Bloodshed traces a more nuanced look at obsession, specifically through the experiences of famed photographer Nan Goldin. Poitras’s film is more overtly political than Oh’s, but there’s a similar determination at play to get at the heart of the mystery of obsession, even if it leaves out the fanaticism part. The target of Goldin’s attention is the Sackler family, which owned Purdue Pharma, the company that made billions on the prescription opioid OxyContin and thus was eventually found responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans through addiction to the drug, which the company not only knew about but encouraged. Goldin was one of those addicts, though she survived her own overdose and afterwards made Sackler a project that required even more of her typically fierce concentration than her art did.
Since Poitras is an observer, she presents Goldin’s crusade as part of a feature-length biography that goes deep into the artist’s battles with mental illness, the history of her nominally transgressive art, and the carefully curated, years-long legal case she brought against the Sacklers. The early biographical material charts Goldin’s rise as a photographer on the east coast—chiefly the queer mecca, Provincetown—where she was a fixture of the demimonde who went from shoplifting and living in relative squalor to producing what is generally considered the most revolutionary photography exhibition of the 1980s, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In the end, she incorporates this theme of conquering the art world into her mission of taking down the Sacklers by destroying them as patrons of art. Over the years, the family has funded many museums, and Goldin is a powerful enough artist in her own right to influence these museums’ self-regard by refusing them to show her work as long as they take her nemeses’ money. It’s perhaps the most elemental depiction of the conflict between art and commerce I’ve ever seen on film, and the drama this conflict evokes is powerful. There’s even palpable intrigue when Goldin discovers she’s being stalked by agents of the Sacklers’ legal team.
It helps that Goldin is articulate about her anger, a quality that’s developed through countless encounters with lawyers and the public as she has beat the drum for greater accountability on the Sacklers’ part. Poitras gives her free rein, and while purists may question the film’s lack of objectivity, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (the title comes from a medical report about the suicide of Goldin’s beloved sister at the age of 18) is meant to be an emotional journey. It is not journalism in the strict sense. It is a chronicle of rage that ends up being a work of art in its own right.
Fanatic, in Korean, is now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
Having passed through the original Ghostbusters craze phase unscathed and unenlightened, I came to the fractured franchise late and never quite got its blend of winking gross-out humor and imaginative but tame scares. There was always something under-cooked about its premise of a professional squad of ectoplasm exterminators, as if all the ideas had been worked out in the kitchen. That’s why the characters themselves are so important to the series, and why the original crew still needs to show up, however peripherally, in the new incarnation—or, at least, until the characters in the new incarnation make as much of an impression. Paul Rudd, who plays Gary, the nominally male head of this new enterprise, which has moved from the Midwest to the old fire station in New York that housed the original Ghostbusters, has imprinted his patented awkward nice guy on too many decent comedies to make the proper impression here (most people who are into this kind of movie will likely look at him and think of Ant-man first), and the three actual blood family members of the crew, mom Callie (Carrie Coon), daughter Phoebe (McKenna Grace), and son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), weren’t given enough distinctive dimensionality in Ghostbusters: Afterlife to carry over to the new movie. I feel I have to get to know them all over again.
The silver lining is that Phoebe gets to reboot her emotional affiliation with the audience by shouldering the one dramatic subplot of the movie. After a job in a sewer goes wrong, she strikes up a friendship with a ghost named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind), whose provenance is never completely clear, but the two bond over conversations about death and family that are surprisingly affecting. Whatever the purpose of this diversion, director Gil Kenan has other entertainment obligations to carry out, and the volume of plot elements he has to juggle overwhelms him in the end. The real “story,” as it were, starts when a slick scam artist (Kumail Nanjiani) tries to sell a family heirloom to original GBer Ray (Dan Aykroyd). It happens to contain an imprisoned ghost that is out for big time revenge in the form of icing over New York City (which, typically, takes the wintery attack in stride). The related action is sufficiently potent but keeps getting interrupted by business that stalls whatever momentum Kenan can muster. Major chunks of expostion are given over to another original GBer, Winston (Ernie Hudson), and the paranormal research center he has built in an abandoned aquarium; as well as Gary’s fanboy obsession with the original Ghostbustermobile, which is presented as a series of flat running jokes. Phoebe’s story doesn’t stand a chance.
So when Bill Murray shows up for his requisite nostalgia appearance in the loud climax, you can practically smell the calculation. Murray has always been good at counteracting his don’t-give-a-shit attitude with crack comic timing that saves even the lamest jokes from themselves, but here he just feels obligatory, especially when he gets frozen in place with nothing much to do. Now how much did he get paid for that?
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
It was inevitable that Christopher Nolan’s multiple Oscar-winning biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, would play in Japan despite some earlier reports that no local distributor would touch it because of Hiroshima/Nagasaki; though it remains to be seen if it’s as much of a box office draw as it’s been in other markets. And, in fact, it does address the utter devastation the bomb inflicted on a human population, albeit in a scene where the titular scientist (Cillian Murphy) imagines that devastation as it affects people who don’t look particularly Asian. Nolan’s reason for not including what actually took place in Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945, is that he has made a movie about a man who was not there on those dates, and, in fact, there are very few sequences in the film that do not center directly on Oppenheimer the man. Moreover, half the script is about what happens to him when he publicly renounces his creation for the terrifyingly destructive thing it is and the uses to which it is being put, so it is hardly a celebration of that creation. Nevertheless, the scene where the news of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is met by Americans with cheers and celebration will undoubtedly make many Japanese people uncomfortable. It made me, an American, very uncomfortable, and I assume that was Nolan’s aim.
Because if the movie is about any one thing it’s hubris—Oppenheimer’s, mainly, but also that of the American intellectual left, the U.S. military, and males in general (the women are treated as cavalierly by the movie as they were in real life). Nolan’s purpose is to get into Oppenheimer’s mind in such a way as to show how those who needed him to produce the bomb could manipulate it to their ends. Normally, such an approach is done with more intimate tools, but Nolan, being Nolan, can’t work intimately, and so he trains his IMAX cameras on easy metaphors—from raindrops in water puddles to explosions on the sun—that are meant to be visually overwhelming. Likewise, Oppenheimer’s ambitions, which take him to Europe to hobnob with intellects and egos as big as his (He learns Dutch in six weeks just to present a lecture!), to the greatest universities in the U.S., where he’s a despised superstar, and finally to the attention of the authorities who exploit that ego—and his Jewish identity—for the war effort, are treated with maximalist detail by populating the cast that revolves around the protagonist with Oscar-winners and other A-listers. At first, I thought this parade of well-known faces would be a distraction (Matt Damon! Emily Blunt!Josh Hartnett! Kenneth Branagh! Robert Downey Jr.! Florence Pugh! Casey Affleck! Rami Malek for two minutes only!) but in Murphy he has an actor who does more with his face than with his voice or his body, and when you see it perform on the huge screen there’s little else to think about. This prioritizing of images at the expense of everything else comes into its own in the middle portion at Los Alamos, where the terrible deed is prepared and demonstrated, and the force that Nolan subsequently unleashes reverberates for the rest of the movie, which deals granularly with Oppenheimer’s political persecution in the 1950s and 60s.
Which isn’t to say Oppenheimer is the usual linear historical epic. Nolan liberally switches time periods and color palette to get what he wants, and if the story’s development seems to defy logic—much in the same way that the theories of the universe Oppenheimer ascribes to do, at least at first—it arrives at its destination with a proper sense of who the man always was and how it destroyed him in the end. What’s revolutionary about Nolan’s movie is how it interrogates the inner life with cinematic devices normally reserved for recreating bombast. Nolan has already proven he can do both, but he’s never juxtaposed the elemental with the gargantuan in such an assured way. It does what blockbusters have always endeavored to do: Hold the audience spellbound for three hours with the biggest gestures money can buy. But rather than assault the senses, Oppenheimer wields these devices in order to force us to ponder the arrogance of human enterprise, which may be the most terrifying thing of all.
Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX 050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX 050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (03-6709-6410), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).
It’s been said by wiser cinema-heads than I that the romcom is dead, killed off by a post-modern critical attitude that doesn’t appreciate the irony that once made the genre appealing. My own take is that the classic trappings of romantic comedies—middle class, middle-brow aesthetics tied to a belief in the transcendant values of monogamous heterosexual love—no longer apply in a world where constant connectivity breeds cynicism toward human relationships. And I’d say that was a shame if I believed in middle class, middle-brow aesthetics in the first place, but the romcoms I’ve always liked—Preston Sturges’ work, Shampoo come to mind—are already cynical, so maybe I was never the target. At the moment, Korean cinema and TV series are thriving on romcom stories, and for the most part they blend the kind of snark I appreciate with the wettest sentimentality you could possibly stand, an often toxic combination that nevertheless keeps you awake to the possibilities of a particular story.
Love Reset is what used to be called high concept, meaning it was pitched for its gimmick—married couple about to get divorced are in an accident that leaves them with amnesia and thus open to the possibility of falling in love all over again—and, as is often the case with any Korean romcom, the story is so unwieldy and imprecise that there’s bound to be something there you like, if only for a minute or two. The introduction is promising: Perpetual law student Jeong-yeol (Kan Ha-neul) is drinking himself into a stupor because the love of his life, Na-ra (Jung So-min), is getting married to somebody else. Though the two have dated for some time, Na-ra, from a well-to-do family, doesn’t think Jeong-yeol, who is going for his fourth or fifth run at the bar exam, is ever going to amount to much, but at the altar she has a Graduate moment and bolts the ceremony, arriving at the bar where Jeong-yeol is blotto to declare her intentions. From here, the movie veers widely away from the path a Western romcom would take, with Na-ra’s family, understanding there’s no point in fighting it, offers to support Jeong-yeol while he studies again for the test, a development that makes Na-ra question her own future with him, and after they marry she finds she can’t stand his spendthrift ways (he’s determined to pay back his in-laws) and purity of purpose. She goes the opposite way by drinking constantly and leaving a mess wherever she goes, and her freelance movie production work suffers for it.
What’s promising about the setup is that after the two lose their memories their families and friends reverse course and endeavor to make sure they don’t get back together again, thus creating a tension between the different intentions at play. A lot of the comedy is self-referential (“this is like something out of a movie”) and the scatological humor might be a bit too ripe for some tastes, but as a sour look at the state of matrimony in Korea and the class pressures that work to its disadvantage it’s often amusing in a broad, slapstick way. In any case, I can’t see how anyone would want to marry either of these clowns.
In Korean. Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-675-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).
One of the few intriguing elements of Fatih Akin’s biopic of the Kurdish-German rapper and media star Giwar Hajabi (professional moniker Xatar) is the title. The composite word comes up when Hajabi, as a child, accompanies his composer-conductor father to a performance of the similarly named opera in Bonn, shortly after his refugee family has arrived from Iran via Iraq and Paris. Das Rheingold is the first of Wagner’s four works addressing German culture’s mythological origin story, and the scene sets the stage for Hajabi’s own self-mythologizing impulses (the Rheingold, after all, makes you immortal) as a foreigner gangster who survives by his wits and outsized personality. It also gives Hajabi a credible grounding in both music and outlaw attitude, the former of which is only latently realized.
Moving back-and-forth through Hajabi’s life, the storyline focuses on hard responses to hardship, with the family suffering mightily in exile following the Iranian Revolution before the elder Hajabi secures work in Germany as a musician—and then promptly abandons his wife and children when he meets another woman. Bullied and vilified by other immigrants and ignored by the natives, Giwar (Emilio Sakraya as an adult, Ilyes Moutaoukkil as a teen) sells porn videos in school to augment household finances and becomes a street fighter who can give as good as he gets when he turns to dealing drugs. Akin doesn’t do much to distinguish the various facets of young Hajabi’s life as he falls headlong into a life of crime that leads him to an expat mob headquartered in Amsterdam who sees his potential and puts him to work. One botched job leads to another and Giwar goes on the lam for stealing a shipment of gold (Aha!), forcing him to hide out in Syria where he’s picked up by local military who torture him to find out where the precious metal is stashed. Because Akin doesn’t follow this portion of Hajabi’s life in a linear fashion it lacks the urgency you expect from stories about criminals caught up in their own miscalculations, and it’s difficult to understand exactly how Hajabi ends up back in Germany in prison. But that’s where he takes up hip-hop as a vocation after having only dabbled in it previously.
Akin borrows what he needs from the canon—a bit of Scarface here, some Tupac music video style there; a lot of Scorsese—but the total package never finds a purchase on the imagination and feels generic as a tale of personal triumph. It doesn’t even register as being particularly dangerous, which is odd since Xatar is a very controversial artist in Germany. In the movie, he’s just another flattened-out example immigrant success.
In German, Kurdish, English, Dutch, Turkish and Arabic. Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (0570-6875-5280).
Though the dwindling birth rate continues to be an important media topic, two recent news items, taken together, highlight one of the less remarked upon reasons for the lack of babies in Japan. At the end of February, the welfare ministry revealed not only the number of births in 2023, but also the number of marriages, which fell below the 500,000 line for the first time in 90 years. In the last few years there have been many news reports about how young Japanese people have shown little if no interest in getting married, mainly for financial reasons, meaning that they tend to think of matrimony as an economic undertaking. Consequently, the government tends to throw money at the issue of shoshika (declining birth rate), thinking that’s the only thing they can do. Another news item, which has been less prominent, may, in fact, prove that the government is right, though it also suggests that, in the end, there’s nothing anyone can do.
A Jan. 18 report on NHK’s morning variety show, Ohayo Nippon, covered the topic of women freezing their eggs, a procedure that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government will subsidize as a countermeasure to the falling birth rate. The idea is that young women who have embarked on careers but haven’t gotten married or even found a suitable partner yet still plan to have children sometime in the future, so while they are young and relatively fertile, they harvest their eggs and store them for later in vitro fertilization (IVF), presumably after they get married.
Depending on the medical institution, harvesting eggs costs between ¥300,000 and ¥600,000, and that doesn’t count storage fees. As with prenatal care, childbirth, abortion, and fertility treatments, harvesting eggs is not covered by national insurance, so Tokyo is offering to pay up to ¥300,000 for the procedure and for storage fees up to 5 years to women who want to undergo the process. Last September, Tokyo started offering explanation sessions for the program, and the number of women who applied was much larger than they expected. In the last three months of 2023, 7,000 women applied for the sessions. A Nihon Keizai Shimbun article published Feb. 16 says that Tokyo will increase the number of women who can receive the subsidy since so many seem to be interested. In 2023, there was only enough money prepared for 200 women, but in 2024 that number will be increased to 2,000. The main conditions for elegibility are age—between 18 and 39—and the applicants must be residents of Tokyo. In addition, they have to attend an explanation session and agree to take part in a survey.
One 31-year-old woman interviewed by NHK who attended a session and has decided to freeze her eggs said that she recently changed jobs and enjoys her work. She doesn’t want to take two or three years off in order to have a child right now, though she does want to be a mother someday. Her main hurdle about freezing eggs so far was worry about “safety and effectiveness,” and apparently one of the aspects of the Tokyo program that spurred her decision was that a local government body is subsidizing the procedure, so it must be reliable. The woman makes no mention of whether she is married now, but the fact that she says she doesn’t want to have a baby right now would seem to suggest she is.
Another woman who has already made the plunge and who works for a “major company” told NHK that in the past she didn’t think seriously about getting married and having children, but as she approached her present age of 39 she felt more desperate about her future, and so decided to freeze her eggs just in case. The woman understood beforehand how difficult it could be, considering her age. A female human being is born with all the eggs she will ever produce in her life, and that number steadily decreases as she gets older, so by the time a woman is 39, it becomes more difficult to harvest a sufficient number of viable eggs for IVF. Two weeks prior to harvesting, the woman had to receive hormone injections to promote ovulation and it caused depression and sluggishness. She told NHK that she did not tell her superiors or colleagues at work because she is afraid of “how they would look at me.” After the procedure, her gynecologist told her that the number of eggs they harvested was lower than the ideal, which would make it more difficult to achieve conception, so she underwent a second round of harvesting. Tokyo gave her a subsidy for the first harvest, but she had to pay herself for the second round. She is understandably anxious, because the subsidy will be revoked if the eggs don’t undergo IVF by the time she turns 43.
As long as everyone is talking about Christopher Nolan, let’s look back at Memento, still my favorite movie by him because it’s such pure cinema, and not just in terms of what you see on the screen. The story is utterly cinematic as it deals with linearity in a way that wouldn’t make sense in any other medium, including the written word. After all, it’s about a guy who can’t remember more than a few minutes into the past and thus has to record and edit experience and save it for later reference. What makes Memento unique is that this looping of time moves backward. Shinji Araki’s similarly schematic Penalty Loop is more conventional, in that the repetitive time loops have a forward momentum, as they do in Groundhog Day. Araki’s protagonist, Jun (Ryuya Wakaba), keeps reliving the same day but changes up the key experience of that day with each successive repeat. If it’s closer in feeling to Nolan’s movie that’s because it’s about revenge, though with Penalty Loop the viewer has to decide in the end if the event that prompted the retribution actually happened.
Also like Groundhog the tone is essentially irreverent. Jun wakes up one day and goes to work where he kills a colleague named Mizoguchi (Yusuke Iseya), who he believes drowned his girlfriend. After disposing of the body and thinking he’s gotten away with the crime he returns home, only to wake up and discover it’s the same day and Mizoguchi is still alive—so he does it again. This scenario replays every time he wakes up, with Jun changing the m.o. in order to achieve closure, but the same day dawns and he has to take an entirely new tack. Eventually, like Bill Murray in Groundhog, he gets to the point where he realizes nothing he does will change matters and becomes almost casual in his approach to homicide. Moreover, his victim comes to expect the violence and even encourages it, adding a layer of comic absurdity that Araki doesn’t always know how to handle.
Loop movies have a built-in hazard, which is that repetition can quickly become…well, repetitious. Araki keeps the action fresh, but the other shoe has to drop at some point, and while the rationale behind Jun’s seeming predicament is clever, Araki seems reluctant to spell it out in terms that would trace a clear through-line from Jun’s girlfriend’s death to Jun’s murderous intent, a process that, along the way, has been affected by technology and commercial protocols. Though not particularly deep, Penalty Loop is one of those movies that encourages post-viewing discussions to help the viewer reach some understanding of what it’s supposed to mean (spoiler: the flyer provides a strong clue), so I would suggest that you see it with someone who likes to talk about movies.
In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa (03-3986-3713).
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