Four Films from Japan Cuts 2023
Repentance is good. At least, it is under certain conditions: it must be clear, sincere, and selfless. Most importantly, while it is always good for the morally at fault to repent, their victims can never be made to forgive their assailant. The Legend & Butterfly, the new film from director Keishi O
I wrote about four films from Japan Cuts 2023 for In Review Online: MONDAYS, The Legend and Butterfly, Wandering, and Under the Turquoise Sky.
MONDAYS
Anyone who has ever worked a 9-5 office job has likely felt stuck performing the same meaningless tasks day after day. The only possibility to break the cycle, one imagines, is a new job — preferably, doing something different and for better wages, too. There’s something quite pitiful in this dreadful repetition; the social connections that bind coworkers, friends, and lovers are consistently drowned by the anti-social routines of capitalism. Director Ryo Takebayashi’s MONDAYS takes these mollified routines and creates a Groundhog Day-esque time-loop movie out of them: one advertising office is literally living the same week over and over.
The Legend & Butterfly
Repentance is good. At least, it is under certain conditions: it must be clear, sincere, and selfless. Most importantly, while it is always good for the morally at fault to repent, their victims can never be made to forgive their assailant. The Legend & Butterfly, the new film from director Keishi Otomo (Rurouni Kenshin), apparently didn’t get the memo that it’s ineffective artistry to rhetorically force forgiveness without first meriting it.
Wandering
Earlier in 2023, this writer vacationed in Montreal and saw Eckhart Schmidt’s The Fan (1982) at the Cinéma Moderne, going in completely blind and only later learning of its controversy: Desireé Nosbusch, who plays the film’s lead, was then only sixteen when she was forced against her will into compromising naked and sexual situations. It seems reasonable, then, to suspect that The Fan would be the most morally compromised film playing this year, but Lee Sang-il Wandering proved this assumption to be terribly wrong. Unlike The Fan, the problem of Wandering is not confined to the ancillary (though very real) issues of its production, but rather, from the crux of its attempted artistry.
Put bluntly, this is a sick film.
Under the Turquoise Sky
No film festival would be complete without a road movie. For the 2023 edition of Japan Cuts, the U.S. premiere of Under the Turquoise Sky checks that box. The country being traveled is Mongolia, and the stated purpose is for Takeshi (Yuya Yagir) to find a woman at his grandfather’s request. It’s a film replete with beautiful images, but it’s not quite a beautiful film. There isn’t a single persuasive or winsome character in it; it falls into the same trap of Western films and the romanticized “going East” trope; and, quite frankly, there just isn’t all that much going on in between the appropriately simple images to make it worth watching.