HESO Magazine

The demise of cinema marks a loss even greater than that of vinyl or even books. After all, music sounds almost the same whether played on a record or an mp3, and e-readers do at least replicate the format of paper books.

But the cinema? However gratifying it might be to download a movie torrent in minutes at home, the experience pales in comparison to walking into a darkened theatre, perfumed with the scent of caramel popcorn and soundtracked by the crackle of anticipation, for your eyeballs to be pelted with a flurry of hypersize images and your ears assaulted by booming surround sound. To me, you could drop your inheritance on an enormous flatscreen TV and a Bose soundsystem, and still come about as close to the real cinematic experience as a cellphone jingle does to a symphony.

I think that’s what the 24th Tokyo International Film Festival was getting at when it chose the slogan, “Believe! The Power of Film”. As with most cultural events since the March 11th tsunami, it came close to being canceled, but eventually went ahead with the requisite “Overcoming the Disaster” section tacked on.

The tone of the festival was therefore even more conservative than usual–and that’s saying something for Tokyo, one of the most anodyne international festivals of the annual circuit. If film is about the big screen, for me, then it goes without saying that festivals are about the scandal beyond the silver screen–be it bed-hopping, brawling or wardrobe malfunctions.

Of the films in the “Overcoming Disaster” documentary section, Fukushima Hula Girls, was the most enjoyable to sit through. Following a troupe of hula dancers at the Spa Resort Hawaiians in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, the documentary delicately balances an optimistic tone with a realistic look at the situation after the nuclear disaster. Particular attention is given to second-in-command Hula Girl Rie Omori, who grew up in Futaba, just two kilometers from the plant, where she remembers playing when she was little. Her grandmother, sitting in her seventh evacuation residence, notes that no-one was anti-nuclear when it was originally built: “We were just farmers and we weren’t rich. But I guess it’s too late now to say we should have opposed it then.”

Underlining her message are the bizarre sights that greet the family when they journey back to their home to recover a few small possessions: cows and even an ostrich wandering aimlessly among the irradiated, waist-high weeds that wreath a large sign declaring “Nuclear power creates a prosperous society”.

Omori is an open and quite charming interviewee, who tries to put a bright spin on the situation. Laughing through tears she recalls how she bought protective

The same love and death theme is at the centre of Gus Van Sant’s latest offering, Restless, the tale of two teenage lovers. We first meet the death-obsessed protagonists–Enoch, a troubled orphan, and Annabel, a terminal cancer patient–as they bump into each other when crashing a funeral. On their second meeting, Henry “introduces” Annabel to his parents’ gravestone, and the topic of Annabel’s imminent death is never far from their minds.

Both of the kids are explicitly quirky, which occasionally turns somewhat contrived. Enoch is friends with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot, Hiroshi, who still wears his uniform and always wins at Battleships. Annabel, meanwhile, is a “bug watcher,” according to Enoch–or more accurately, a Darwinian devotee obsessed with evolution and ornithology. She tests Enoch and herself on names and characteristics of birds, and her unbelievably prosaic attitude to her own death is probably an effect of her belief that every individual human life is nothing but a blip in the grand evolutionary scheme.

Perhaps, as the actor who plays Hiroshi, Ryo Kase suggested at a Q&A after the screening, this is Van Sant’s idealization of a heterosexual relationship (he’s gay). Kase said that he found their relationship a little too “pure” the first time he watched the film, and asked a gay friend about it, who told him that as a member of a minority who “have to live alone”, Van Sant had likely injected a little of his idealized innocence and sweetness into the relationship. I take this to mean that it was perhaps a little unrealistic and not as fractious as it could have been. Moreover, the invention of a ghost as Enoch’s only friend echoes the isolation that can accompany coming out and being gay as a young man.

This is an interesting angle to offer at a film festival in Japan, where homosexuality is not often publically discussed and is often only tacitly accepted. However, it

The best that I saw, however, was saved until last: Detachment. British director Tony Kaye takes a highly critical–and dramatic–look at the American education system through the eyes of a substitute teacher, Henry, played by Adrien Brody. On Henry’s first day in the classroom, we see something remarkable: a teacher who’s able to handle even the most violent of kids in a calm and respectful way. In response to some perceived slight, a kid begins heckling him before marching up to the blackboard and threatening to attack. Henry defuses the situation by telling him, “I understand that you’re angry. I used to be angry too.”

Used to be? In the next scene, his temperament makes an about-face: when called to coax his grandfather out of the nursing home bathroom he has locked himself into, he launches a fiery tirade on the nurse for not removing the locks as he had requested. “I could make you lose your job so it’s your children, your family!” he yells, almost spitting with rage. “Don’t ever call me out here at this hour again!” On the way home he has a strange encounter with a child prostitute (looking not unlike Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver) after she gets punched by a john on the bus. He pushes her away, seemingly indifferent to the fact she is bleeding from the mouth.

So: does he care about people, or not? Although he says he “used to be” angry, where is all this current rage coming from? The blurry, color-drenched Super8 footage cut into the movie gives us some hints: his mother. Exactly how his childhood influenced his current state remains unclear until the end of the film, but they’re a constant reminder that this man is damaged. Not, however, as damaged as the kids he’s attempting to teach, or even his fellow teachers. Most reviews have described this film as a biting critique of the U.S. school system, and another string of the movie is a retrospective interview with Henry, who describes all of its failings.

The kids are violent, self-hating, scantily dressed. They hammer cats to death in the gymnasium and hurl expletive-filled insults at teachers in lieu of morning greetings–and their parents do the same when they bother to contact the school. Worn down by relentless abuse and not enough thanks, the teachers are also close to snapping–and their mental state is rendered more explicit by the intermittent animations that pop up, showing frantically scribbled blackboard pictures of guillotines, blood and collapsing structures.