A Life More Ordinary

Over at the ICA, the Japan Foundation has put together a programme of 6 films under the heading “A Life More Ordinary”. The films, all from the last few years, are intended to show a more realistic side to Japanese life, free from ghosts, gore, geishas and the like. I managed to catch four of the films (in for a penny, in for a pound!)

Kamikaze Girls was a teen girl buddy movie, the girls friendship being unlikely because they hailed from two very different yoof tribes – Momoko being a “Lolita” who loves to dress ‘rococo’, all frills and bonnets, and Ichigi being a ‘Yanki’ biker chick who spits and headbuts people at the slightest provocation. The film was glitzy and high energy, perhaps not the deepest film but delightful nonetheless.

The Cat Leaves Home was just about as different as it was possible to be, minimalist, moody, sketchy, but at its heart also lay an uneasy relationship between two girls, older this time, who since their schooldays have always fallen out over boys, the prettier of the two always getting the guy. A film of subtle gradations, where not an awful lot happens, the frumpier of the two manages to get some revenge on the prettier girl, who herself has to come to terms with her own fallibility and limitations.

Kaza-hana was an odd couple road trip, the couple being a hostess who wants to return home to see her child whom she hasn’t seen for five years, having left her in the care of her own mother after the father’s death, and a disgraced and deeply unpleasant bureaucrat whose drunken shoplifting of a can of beer has made it into all the papers. When the hostess attempts suicide having been rejected by her family, you really don’t know which way the film is going to go. Had this been Hollywood you would be pretty confident that it would all come good in the end, and/or the hype surrounding the film would have given you a pretty good idea of what the outcome was. But with no prior cultural knowledge, predicting the outcome was impossible, making the finale truly gripping.

No One’s Ark was probably the most difficult film to watch of the four. A black comedy who’s humour frankly felt very alien to me (the Japanese in the audience found it hilarious though!) and yet a film which in some ways, for all the jokes about snot, had the most incisive moments. It was a film about a couple dreaming of business success selling a new health drink, but the problem is that it tastes disgusting, and they refuse to sell it in small quanities, thus alienating the few potential customers they manage to attract. They return to the bloke’s hometown, where he behaves very badly indeed to his family and his girlfriend.

Some interesting themes emerged across the various films, even though they were all very different. Most characters were either dreaming of going to Tokyo or if they had gotten there, were now dreaming of escaping it. A sense of failure, in business / career and in relationships, pervaded the films, with an undercurrent of unfulfillable pressure to live up to the way of life of previous generations. The women in particular seemed trapped in unsatisfactory relationships, unable to escape because the prospect of starting out again seemed a worse solution than sticking with what they had. The men on the other hand seemed withdrawn, slightly out of time. Universal themes but at the same all the films seemed uniquely Japanese.