The Clone Returns Home クローンは故郷をめざす [2009] • Japan

I'll start right off saying I'm not equipped to properly review this film but since my modus operandi here is not to review films as much as react to them, I'll indulge myself. I'm not much of a science fiction fan but I love Hiromi Nagasaku so I checked this one out. The Clone Returns Home (aka The Clone Returns to the Homeland) is a heady, metaphorical, poetic, extremely slow and beautiful film. There aren't a bunch of fancy gadgets or spaceships, nor aliens running around. The only reason to call this "sci-fi" is the photographic tweak to things that makes it feel like it's in the future (it is), and the fact that the main protagonist is an astronaut and his spacesuit plays a big role in the film. And, well ... there's the science.

The Clone Returns Home explores the notion of identity by way of cloning and it spends a good deal of expositional time discussing it and the ethical milieu it exists in. It also spends a good deal of non-expositional time observing some guy carry around a spacesuit.

Kohei is an astronaut who dies while on a mission in outer space. His company can legally clone him, complete with all his memories and feelings, as a sort of insurance reimbursement. His wife (Nagasaku) is a little freaked out by this notion, and thus begins the exploration of identity. Things get complicated when Kohei's memory bank seems to get filled back up only to a point in his childhood when his identical twin brother died while trying to rescue him from drowning at a fishing hole. At first I thought it was kind of cheap to use identical twins who, we learn through flashbacks, as children often tried to pass themselves off for one another, as the starting point in an exploration of identity. Even more so when this developmentally stunted clone goes missing and the company decides to clone him again, essentially making an identical twin clone. But then I realized the director wasn't trying to make a solid argument or theory about identity (or cloning) as much as trying to cook up a complex stew of ideas and invite the viewers in to sample all the spices. Just as it takes a connoisseur to fully appreciate the complexities of a fine wine, it will take a hardcore sci-fi fan to get her head around all that's being explored in this film. It's not for casual viewers. I couldn't begin to tell you who is in the spacesuit (which appears to be empty half the time), or who is carrying around whom. The film's glacially slow pace, meant to give the viewer time to savor the ingredients of the film as a whole and the spacesuit in particular, will not play well at the mall.

If I were a sci-fi junkie, especially one who enjoyed the heady and intellectual, I might give The Clone Returns Home five stars. But I'm not, so I give it three ... which means your mileage may vary.

★★★

Director:
Starring: Mitsuhiro Oikawa, Eri Ishida, Hiromi Nagasaku, Kyusaku Shimada, Ryô Tsukamoto
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Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! 腑抜けども、悲しみの愛を見せろ (Funuke domo, kanashimi no ai wo misero) [2007] • Japan

This is what Japanese cinema is all about: A good title, twisted family drama, black humor that hurts more than it tickles, a little sexual deviance, beautiful women. Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! has it all.

The films starts with a gruesome bus accident that kills the parents of siblings Shinji, Sumika, and Kiyomi. Kiyomi, an aspiring manga artist, witnesses it and decides the images would make good material for her next project. Four years ago, in their countryside home, elder sister Sumika (Eriko Sato) carved a checkerboard into her father's forehead because he wouldn't finance her dream of moving to Tokyo to become an actress. She turned to prostitution. Younger sister Kiyomi (Aimi Satsukawa) used her sister's actions as manga material and got it published. Sumika, in shame, left for Tokyo. The two sisters have not gotten along since. The death of the parents comes at a good time for Sumika who hasn't made it as an actress and is deeply in debt. She returns to her country homestead in the hopes of collecting some inheritance but finds out there isn't any. The rest of the story, although intricately woven, is not important here. Suffice to say the three siblings have deep dark secrets and rivalries that come boiling to the surface. It's the performances that make this film so good.

Robo-babe, pin-up girl, horror queen, and Cutie Honey: Live Action star Eriko Sato gives the performance of her career as the relentlessly cruel and self-absorbed Sumika. Sometimes a role is just made for someone, and Sato takes this one and runs with it. Aimi Satsukawa brings wonderful pathos to the asthmatic, innocent yet deeply disturbed, Kiyomi. Veteran actor Masatoshi Nagase is solid and creepy as the brother who's gone where brothers are not supposed to go with sister Sumika. Sato is the star of the film and the whole thing would be unbearably dark and cruel if it weren't for the hilarious and wholesome performance of Hiromi Nagasaku as Shinji's wife, Machiko. Shinji procured Machiko via a marriage agency and Machiko, wanting to escape the demands and false hopes of the city thinks she will settle nicely into the lives of some good ol' down home country folk. Oops. Nagasaku, deservedly, has won multiple awards for her performance. She elevates every film she is in and this one is no exception. She plays the straight man to all the morbid cruelty going on around her. Her Machiko is as much of a failure as everyone else but she hasn't learned to take it out on others. She just wants everyone to get along.

Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! takes the theme of dysfunctional family drama and wrings it dry. If you like your humor dark and cruel, punctuated with double-takes that are sweet, wholesome, and absurd, you'll love this movie.

★★★★★

Director: Daihachi Yoshida
Starring: Eriko Sato, Aimi Satsukawa, Hiromi Nagasaku, Masatoshi Nagase, Seiji Nozoe
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Su-ki-da [2005] • Japan

I felt Hiroshi Ishikawa's previous film, Tokyo.Sora, set out to make boring an accomplishment so I wasn't interested in seeing this until I discovered Hiromi Nagasaku in Don't Laugh at My Romance and then Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers! She's a versatile actress who elevates every film she's in and brings the necessary talent to make this low-key character study work. The script and story here aren't much--secret love, disease, recognition, love, death--typical melodrama, but Nagasaku and her younger self counterpart played by Aoi Miyazaki are truly engaging and look remarkably like they could be the same person ten years apart. I could literally see their thought and emotional processes. If you are going to leave the camera on an actor for minutes at a time without any dialog, you better have good actors. The director's signature long shots and pale, landscapey photography compliment well here. This is not for the Harlequin crowd, it's an art-house film with a capital A. Lovely and meditative. Su-ki-da means I love you.

★★★★

Closed Note (2007) • Japan

OMG! And I mean that. What a wonderful weeper. A tad trite with some minor manipulations and big blunders, but it's well played and when crying time came I was a willing participant. This film contains a couple firsts for me: a pen fetish as plot device, (our heroine works in a pen store where they have test units "not ready" for sale); and a mandolin recital that reaches adrenaline rushing heights, (she also plays the mandolin). The performance of the man conducting the mandolin orchestra is worth the price of admission alone.

Closed Note is beautifully shot and set. It's not unusual for a movie to depict locations that promote envy in its viewers, but the lush, lush greenery of this film, embracing beautifully cut old and new Japanese architecture and landscape patterns, at times seeming to swallow them up, instills hope and a peaceful, serene mood without seeming fantastic. The second floor apartment where the girls in our film live, and lived, is reached by descending a large stone staircase which ends at the front door of the building. It's not clear how one reaches the apartment from that front door, but no matter. When loved ones leave the building, they ascend the stairs and arrive at the same level as the window to the apartment making them seem far away and close at the same time; cries of love and farewell are given increased dramatic score.

Hope and love and dreams. Heartbreak and ambition. They're all here, given voice by the school teacher whose diary our mandolin playing pen store clerk reads. It's a little tough at times to attach yourself to the way these matters of the heart are gleaned from interactions with her 4th grade students, but Yuko Takeuchi, as the school teacher, performs with such heart-tapping sincerity (you'll see), I played along willingly. There's a little girl who can no longer attend class because she doesn't feel she has the strength in her heart to live up to the teacher's plea to all be "children of the sun" and "live like a family" which she illustrates by example of someone farting in class. "Not that I'm advocating casual farting in class, but it doesn't matter who farted." Oops. Take a deep breathe. Move on.

Although I think she could use a new hair stylist, Erika Sawajiri, as the diary reader, is as pretty and engaging as an angel; her performance is unimpeachable except for a couple boo-boos during the mandolin recital. Some of her facial expressions made me forget I was watching a movie and was instead reminiscing with videotapes of my own true love.

Yusuke Iseya as the emotionally unavailable, or emotionally naive love object and artist is also good. When he comes into the pen store to try out pens, he waves them around, mumbles pen-love adjectives, scribbles a bit, and returns them to the clerk without looking at her. It's obvious he means business.

Speaking of obvious, when the plot finally revealed itself completely I smacked my head and cried "Doh!" But the beauty of a good film with good performances, cinematography, and direction (performances, mostly) is staying inside the characters, not getting outside of them and thinking about things they are not thinking about. When the curtain is pulled back, we see what they see, as they see it, when they see it. Despite a few over-the-top moments and a couple inexplicable plot holes, Closed Note kept me engaged, inside its characters until the final page before the tacked on epilogue I could have done without because it kind of ruined the film. But no matter.

★★★★