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Young people in Japanese and Korean indies often evince a distinct cognitive dissonance, purposely rubbing against the stereotype of the good son or daughter in the Confucian tradition. Those of us who are not Japanese or Korean may feel cut off: Adolescent disaffection is universal and perhaps more acute in a social milieu that distinctly places greater value on family cohesion, but there’s usually the feeling that the filmmaker is trying to make their point by exaggerating certain attributes. Hikari, the narrator of Makoto Nagahisa’s debut feature, is a 13-year old video game addict who has just lost both parents in a bus accident and feels nothing. Actually, scratch that. He betrays some relief, because he obviously didn’t love his parents, and the sentiment may have been mutual—to call Hikari an unreliable narrator would be an understatement.

Hikari isn’t being cynical. He’s still too young to have cultivated a sense of the world, but he knows his feelings or lack thereof, which is credible in its own way. However, Nagahisa compounds the disaffection by bringing Hikari together with three other 13-year-olds who have also lost both parents, and at the same funeral parlor on the same day. Again, all seem underwhelmed by their loss, and recognize that there is perhaps something wrong with that, but since they’re still kids they are now free to do whatever they want. The fantastical elements of Nagahisa’s narrative go beyond this unbelievable coincidence. There seems to be no serious guardianship issues at play, and the four flit freely from one home to another indulging their childish whims and philosophizing about the total moral bankruptcy of adulthood. There’s nothing malicious in their attitude, and if Nagahisa gets anything precisely right about their youthful lark it’s that they understand how their peculiar situation allows them to put off responsibility for as long as possible.

The kicker comes when they visit a refuse facility and encounter a group of homeless individuals who inspire them to form a rock band, which becomes a viral hit. Now you can chalk the movie’s sensibility up to cynicism, though it’s Nagahisa’s rather than the kids’. It helps to understand that the director used to work for advertising behemoth Dentsu, so he certainly knows the ins and outs of the BIG CON. Inevitably, the Little Zombies’ relative success indirectly helps them achieve an emotional maturity that provides the movie with the kind of sentimental closure we normally expect from Japanese indies.

All of this would be fairly conventional if not for the structure and the production design, which references computer game visuals and logic (it seems to be the only way Hikari could tell a story), not to mention the manic pacing, propelled by editing on steroids. We Are Little Zombies makes its point effectively enough, but its exhaustive insistence on being emotionally dry until the point when it isn’t still feels manipulative.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

We Are Little Zombies home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2019 “We Are Little Zombies” Film Partners

Disaffected youth is a currency that filmmakers never tire of trying to exchange in hopes of finding a theme that suits their world view. Everybody was young once, and if experience counts for a lot when telling a story, the coming-of-age tale has built-in advantages. In this small Canadian film, the director is a man and the protagonist an 18-year-old girl living through that magic hour of adolescence, from the last month of high school through to the end of the subsequent summer. Leonie (Karelle Tremblay) is typically skeptical about everything in the ways of cinematic teen heroines. She bristles whenever an adult confronts her with her future. “I’m only 18,” she spits back. “I have plenty of time to decide.” Her bad attitude is manifest right off the bat when she bails on a restaurant meal in her honor hosted by her mother (Marie-France Marcotte) and stepfather (Francois Papineau). She pretends to use the rest room and then walks out the door and catches a bus.

The fact that mom doesn’t seem particularly surprised by this rude act indicates Leonie’s personality has been brittle for some time. She barely keeps her contempt for her stepfather—a radio commentator who rails against environmentalists and anti-capitalists—in check, and doesn’t really have any close friends to speak of. While hanging out with a group of associates at a 50s-themed restaurant in her small Quebec town, one friend makes fun of a bearded guy eating alone at the counter, picking up on his couture of flannel shirt, rocker T-shirt, and blue jeans. “What’s life like in 1985?” she teases him. Leonie, however, is intrigued, probably because she seems to think the modern world sucks and that things were better before she was born.

The throwback in question, a thirty-something slacker named Steve (Pierre-Luc Brillant), becomes Leonie’s confidant. He teaches guitar and lives in his mother’s basement. One of Leonie’s projects for her aimless summer is to take guitar lessons from Steve, and he proves to be a gifted musician, which prompts the inevitable question: Why isn’t he playing in a band, making a living from a skill he obviously enjoys? Steve has no ready answer; something about being averse to the big city and a personality that doesn’t accommodate itself to group dynamics. In essence, he’s the other temperamental side to Leonie’s misanthropy—less caustic, more resigned to life without drama. And for a while, their easy relationship forms the core of the film’s sensibility. Writer-director Sebastien Pilote brings up the obvious sexual tension between them a few times without letting it get anywhere, and what he misses in potential drama he makes up for with naturalism that is refreshing without being doctrinnaire. In fact, the movie’s lack of emotional payoffs is what makes it so strangely appealing. There is only one scene of violence in the film, and it comes at the expense of property not people. The most fraught relationship is not that between Leonie and Steve but rather between Leonie and her birth father (Luc Picard), a former union leader whose advocacy for the local paper mill ended in failure and forced him to leave town. He now works seasonally “up north” on an undesignated project. Leonie has formed the opinion that his stepfather had something to do with his exile, but the truth ends up being much more problematic, and Leonie can’t cope with the way it makes her feel.

That Leonie’s fate is no more certain at the end of the movie than it was at the start is another risky gambit that Pilote pulls off with disarming ease. Generally speaking, fiction films that attempt to address life as it’s really lived come off as either pretentious or just plain boring, especially when the protagonist is an 18-year-old “brat.” The Fireflies Are Gone is not nearly as entertaining or emotionally satisfying as Lady Bird, but it’s more credible and the lessons it teaches more affecting.

In French. Opens June 15 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Fireflies Are Gone home page in Japanese.

photo (c) Corporation ACPAV Inc. 2018

There’s something refreshingly irreverent about Hiroshi Okuyama’s debut feature, but it’s not in the Japanese title, which translates directly as “I hate Jesus.” Appropriately small-scale in both production values and ideas, the movie posits Christianity as an object of curiosity. People of faith will find it quaint at best, while the rest of us may think it’s grandly pulling a leg or two, though in spots it reveals a disarming seriousness. If, in the end, it doesn’t say much about organized religion, it does say something interesting about the cult of Christ.

Our hero is nine-year-old Yura (Yura Sato), who moves from Tokyo to the mountains of Gunma Prefecture to live with his grandmother. The reason for the move isn’t elucidated, though it seems to have something to do with Yura’s character. In any event, he’s enrolled in a local Catholic school, which is odd in that neither Yura nor his parents seem particularly religious. 

Yura’s problems adjusting are hardly unusual, especially since he’s an odd duck to begin with—slow on the uptake, but somewhat sly in his measure of people. He’s bullied as a newcomer but seems to take in stride. Since prayer is offered to him as a means of getting what you want (isn’t that sort of what it is?), he asks for a friend, and eventually gets one in the form of Kazuma (Riki Okuma), with whom he shares a nascent liking for soccer. Obviously, this prayer thing has its benefits, and next he prays for money and gets it in the form of a gift from his grandmother.

These rewards are preceded by visions of the Lord, a diminutive white guy (Chad Mullane) dressed in the hackneyed robes and carrying on like a silent Jimny Cricket. The comical quality of this element plays up the superstitious side of Catholicism, which makes it more amenable to Japanese spiritualism, though Okuyama doesn’t go very far with the idea. When tragedy strikes, Yura wonders, like any good papist, why his God has forsaken him, or, at least, why He’s such a jerk. Yura, in a sense, grows up as a result, though the viewer has to wonder about the long-lasting damage to his psyche.

Jesus is slight by any aesthetic measure, and if it shows any promise it’s in Okuyama’s realization of his limitations. Even the humor is low-key, which at times undercuts the irreverence, but in a sense irreverence, like beauty and faith, is in the eye of the beholder.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068).

Jesus home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2019 Kaikai Senden

Though it doesn’t really amount to much in the end, director Bart Layton’s decision to claim up front that his heist movie is a bona fide “true story”—as opposed to a movie “inspired” by one—is a fairly bold step, and compels him to add inserts wherein the actual people involved in the caper provide details, albeit from inside prison, thus letting us know rather soon how the heist turns out. It’s not really much of a spoiler, because despite unerring confidence in their criminal skills, the two masterminds behind the robbery, art student Spencer (Barry Keoghan) and his less savvy pal Warren (Evan Peters), who’s the beneficiary of a sports scholarship, don’t really give the impression that they know what they’re really getting into.

The caper takes place at the college they’re attending in Kentucky. The fact that it’s called Transylvania University is a good enough joke by itself, though Layton, honoring his pledge to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, doesn’t take advantage of it. The school library has a number of valuable first editions, and the pair’s aim is to steal a few and sell them for lots of money on the black market in Europe, though, in fact, money isn’t really the reason they’re doing it, and in the end it probably would have been better if they had been in it for the cash, because they probably would have given up before they got too far.

Certainly the most fictive element of the plan is to use older heist movies for research, which begs the question right off the bat: Couldn’t they tell by watching Kubrick’s The Killing that these kinds of jobs rarely go off well? Eventually, they bring in two other friends (Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson) for assistance, and the attendant complications split the difference between admirably methodical and completely silly. Had they bothered to watch Reservoir Dogs, for instance, they’d have realized that giving themselves color-coded names would only end in infamy. There are also potent comic bits on the use of disguises during a particularly ominous practice run-through. 

All this dodgy presentation adds to the viewer’s sense of doomed anticipation, so by the time the actual heist occurs, we’re pretty much on edge, prepared for the worst, and Layton doesn’t disappoint. But for all the artful direction and careful use of those interviews, there’s something peculiarly lacking in the film, mainly a sense of purpose. Layton has essentially produced an anti-heist film in that the viewer gains no sense of suspense or excitement, but rather a sinking feeling that these fools are going down. Layton’s got guts and good storytelling sense, but he might have chosen a tale that was a little less descriptive of American male stupidity. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).

American Animals home page in Japanese.

photo (c) AI Film LLC/Channel Four Television Corporation/American Animal Pictures Limited 2018