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Horror films that double as allegories have their work cut out for them. Most horror aficionados just want a good jolt or two and having to navigate the symbols and metaphors can be tiresome. Swedish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm’s debut feature announces its intentions right away by showing a perfect family sitting for a group selfie for the mother’s popular housekeeping blog. Everybody is dressed in spotless white or beige and surrounded by home decor that practically glows with the expression of upper mobility. This will be a movie about surfaces and people who move through existence trying to impress other people without actually cultivating an inner life. Then a bird rudely crashes through the window and the mother (Sophia Heikkila), all smiles and crinkly chiffon, picks it up and snaps its neck.

This lack of subtlety will persist throughout the film, thus robbing it of any suspense it might want to build up for the gross parts. The protagonist is 12-year-old daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), an adept but not particularly game gymnast who does everything Mother (she isn’t given a name) insists she does in order to maintain the perfect family image for her blog. Shocked by Mother’s treatment of the bird, Tinja walks through the woods one day pondering life and death and comes upon an egg that seems abandoned and brings it home. Over time, the egg grows to enormous proportions while Tinja hides it from her family. Of course, eventually it hatches and what comes out is pretty disgusting, not to mention needy. The connection between this creature and Tinja is more than just that of hatchling and mother bird. The creature acts out Tinja’s subconscious impulses, including her resentment of her bratty younger brother, her jealousy toward a fellow member of the gymnastics team, and, inevitably, her buried hatred of her mother, who she recognizes as a hypocrite of staggering arrogance—not only does she have another family, but she advertises the fact, as if her domestic talents were just too much for a single brood. 

As the creature starts to not only mimic Tinja’s behavior but take on her appearance, the movie’s horror devices kick in without really making much of an impression, mainly because we’ve seen them before utilized to much more dramatic effect. What keeps you watching is not just the creature’s creepy metamorphosis, but Solalinna’s. As Tinja she has a demure innocence that seems almost preternatural, and when she changes, the effect is quite startling.

In Swedish. Opens April 15 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645). 

Hatching home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Silva Mysterium, Hobab, Film i Vast

Given what’s going on in Ukraine right now, many people may feel disinclined to take in a Russian movie, but the release in Japan of Dear Comrades!, a 2020 film by Andrei Konchalovsky, is timely in a chilling way. Based on a 1962 incident where factory workers in the small town of Novocherkassk peacefully demonstrated for higher wages when food prices spiked and were then killed by soldiers, the movie seems to take for granted the notion that Soviet authorities had no compunction about using deadly force just for convenience’s sake, even against their own people. As more than one person says during the course of the movie, life is pretty cheap under communism.

Of course, what’s going on now in Ukraine is not the work of the Communist Party, but a subtheme of Dear Comrades! is a kind of passive belief that Russia has alway been in thrall to authoritarianism. The protagonist, Lyudmilla (Yuliya Vysotskaya), is a Soviet functionary who blithely cuts the ubiquitous lines at retailers to collect her rations before anyone else can get theirs, but from the first scene it’s clear that just acquiring daily necessities is a full-time job that uses up everyone’s surplus energy. Lyudmilla carries her privilege with confidence and whenever someone even suggests that the food shortages are the doings of the party she puts them in their place with assurance. She even defends Stalin, who has already been in the grave for 9 years, replaced by a man who understood the destruction he caused even if he doesn’t say so out loud. To Lyudmilla, the state would be in better shape if Stalin were still running things.

The protest happens during a committee meeting that descends into chaos after the Kremlin calls them demanding they put an end to it by any means necessary. What follows is necessarily confusing because as orders make their way trough the byzantine Soviet bureaucracy anything that can go wrong likely does. The consequence is that lower officials quickly supplant their superiors and take out their grievances on them, thus multiplying the deadly toll initiated by the strike. At first, Konchalovsky seems to be aiming for some kind of dark satire, but once Lyudmilla realizes that her own daughter may have been involved in the demonstration, the movie’s whole mood turns deadly serious, with Lyudmilla doing double duty finding out the fate of her daughter and preventing her own arrest—or worse. Shot in black-and-white and framed with an eye for the austere beauty of Soviet brutalist architecture, the movie often feels calculated to the point of preciousness, and much of the drama of the second half doesn’t have as much power as the bleak comedy of the first. Dear Comrades! is sobering but it would have achieved more of its intended effect if it wasn’t telling us something we already knew. 

In Russian. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Dear Comrades! home page in Japanese

photo (c) Produced by Production Center of Andrei Konchalovsky Foundation for support of cinema, scenic and visual arts commissioned by VGTRK 2020

This award-winning film, the debut feature of Cassio Pereira dos Santos, addresses the predicament of trans teens in a country like Brazil, which has certain built-in cultural mores that are at once accepting of sexual minorities and mistrustful of them. The unassailable premise of the story is that everyone should be able to live the life they want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else or otherwise impinge on their right to live their own life. The title character (Thiessa Woinbackk), a lower middle class 17-year-old whose mother has her back but is denied the normal adolescent experiences her peers enjoy, sees her problem as one of exposure. After she is assaulted at a nightclub where a young man comes on to her only to be told she is trans, she urges her mother to quit their home town and move to a new town where no one knows anything about her. The logic of this strategy is both understandable as a plot point and slightly suspicious in terms of how real life works. Conveniently, Valentina’s mother, Marcia (Guta Stresser), has just been certified as a nurse, so the decision to move is made that much easier.

However, after finding a place to rent in the home of an elderly woman, Valentina attempts to enroll at the local high school and while the administrator has no problem with her trans status, in order for her to enroll with her preferred name rather than the one she was given at birth, Raul, she needs the assent of both parents, which means she has to hunt down her estranged father, who, Valentina believes, left because she transitioned. As she searches for him, she becomes more acclimatized to her new environment, making friends at school (which has allowed her a grace period to acquire her father’s signature) and excelling in algebra and chemistry. Tellingly, perhaps, her best friends, who initially do not know she is trans, are the gay stringbean Julio (Ronaldo Bonafro) and the blithely pregnant hacker Amanda (Leticia Franco). Pereira dos Santos follows a fairly formulaic development, alternating normal teen shenanigans with the inevitable creeping public disclosure of Valentina’s situation. However, he keeps the viewer off balance by constantly shifting expectations. When Valentina’s father, Renato (Romulo Braga), finally shows up and does the right thing, he’s not the aggrieved paterfamilias we were expecting, but instead a shy, awkward man whose reasons for leaving turn out to be more complicated than anyone might want to admit. Similarly, once the town bigots start to circulate gossip about Valentina, she finds that not only do her peers come to her aid, but so do most of the adults in her orbit. Which isn’t to say the bigotry isn’t real or destructive (a card at the end informs us that more than 80 percent of trans teens don’t graduate and the life expectancy of a trans person in Brazil is 35), only that it’s owned by a minority. The moral of Valentina may be not be very original, but it’s worth pondering: Most people are kind. They’re just not strong. 

In Portuguese. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Valentina home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Campo Cerrado