Blackboard / ブラックボード (1986)

Obscure Japanese Film #17

Takeshi (Terutake Tsuji, centre left) and his minions dish it out.

 

One of two films by the incredibly prolific Kaneto Shindo released in 1986, Blackboard begins with a credit sequence featuring enigmatic images of a young man in sports gear running towards the camera. A jaunty musical theme courtesy of frequent collaborator Hikaru Hayashi suggests we are about to watch a comedy.  Wrong. The opening scene concerns the discovery of the body of a 15-year-old male who has obviously not died of natural causes, suggesting the film is actually going to be a murder mystery. Wrong again. The murder is soon solved – two of the boy’s classmates did it – and, as the story unfolds in flashback, we come to realise that this is actually a work of social realism examining the problem of bullying. 

Takeshi's mother (Nobuko Otowa) says goodbye to her son for what turns out to be the last time. 

 

Although the tone is a little earnest and the script threatens to become didactic at times, Shindo maintains the interest well for the most part, but appears to run out of steam towards the end, ultimately offering no solutions to the all-too-common problem presented and leaving himself with nowhere to go. On the plus side, the scenes of bullying are mostly well-staged and often discomfiting to watch. However, while the headmaster of the school is portrayed as a largely decent man genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of his pupils, his apparent surprise at the existence of the problem seems a bit much after Shindo has spent so much time depicting the school as almost entirely populated by nasty little sadists. 

Nobuko Otowa suffering for her art.

 

Giving his long-time mistress and eventual wife Nobuko Otowa an even less glamorous role than usual, here Shindo casts her as the mother of the murdered boy; she’s a single parent who works as a cleaner, and there’s a detailed sequence of her scrubbing toilets to prove it. At least she has a couple of good dramatic scenes, unlike the great Hisashi Igawa, who has little to do except huff and puff as the Deputy Headmaster, although Shindo favourite Taiji Tonoyama is put to amusing use as a distinguished ornithologist (!) who happened to witness the murder while bird-watching. 

Taiji Tonoyama demonstrates his skill with a telescope.

 

Though less familiar, most of the other actors in the cast give appropriately naturalistic performances, with Terutake Tsuji making a strong film debut as Takeshi, the bully-turned-murder-victim.[1] If the crusading journalist played by Shin Takuma never quite convinces, the fault is in the script not the acting. Overall, I felt that Blackboard is no overlooked masterpiece, but certainly contains enough good work to be worth seeing.

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[1] His subsequent film appearances have been few and most of his work has been on stage and TV.

Bridge of Japan / 日本橋 / Nihonbashi (1956)

Obscure Japanese Film #16

 

Chikage Awashima

Kon Ichikawa’s first film in colour stars three of Japan’s most popular actresses of the era as a trio of suffering geisha during the Meiji period (1868-1912). Okoh (Chikage Awashima) is being pestered by the obsessive Igarashi (Eijiro Yanagi), a former seafood seller from Hokkaido who is nicknamed ‘Red Bear’ as he constantly wears a disgusting bear skin. Having spent all his money on his hopeless love for Okoh, he finds a cheap source of food in the grubs he finds wriggling around in his bizarre garment. 

 

Eijiro Yanagi as 'Red Bear'

Okoh’s rival is Kiyoha (Fujiko Yamamoto), who has a less revolting suitor in the well-dressed and educated Katsuragi (Ryuji Shinagawa), although he states rather disconcertingly that he yearns to marry her because she reminds him of his missing sister. Unfortunately, Kiyoha has a ‘sponsor’ with whom she has an illicit child, so she’s in no position to marry. 

Fujiko Yamamoto and Ryuji Shinagawa

 

Despite being a humourless, self-pitying dullard with a sister fetish, Katsuragi attracts the attention of Okoh while he’s surreptitiously throwing some clams and sea snails off a bridge for incomprehensible reasons; naturally, she falls instantly in love with him. Meanwhile, Okoh’s naïve young friend and colleague Ochise (Ayako Wakao) is bullied in the street by a gang of boys before being rescued by a mysterious monk.

Ayako Wakao

 

Ichikawa had just received a bashing from the press after his previous film, Punishment Room, had caused a Clockwork Orange-type controversy when it was blamed for inspiring a spate of crimes in which women had been drugged and raped. His choice of Bridge of Japan for his next project suggests that he had no wish to court such controversy and wanted to play it safe. The source is a 1914 novel by Kyoka Izumi,[1] who adapted it into a play the following year. [2] A 1929 silent version by Kenji Mizoguchi is now lost. In complete contrast to Punishment Room, Bridge of Japan is a sentimental melodrama which must have seemed somewhat old-fashioned even at the time, and it may well be the case that Ichikawa was more concerned with the visual aspects of his first colour film than the content. However, it does look beautiful and is, of course, very well-made and well-acted, with enough quirky elements to maintain interest. 

In terms of acting, the female stars all acquit themselves admirably; although Ayako Wakao has the more minor of the three roles, her skill is evident in a scene in which she chats with her grandfather while cooking a meal and doing all sorts of complicated things with the props. Perhaps this unusual adeptness caught the attention of the Assistant Director – Yasuzo Masumura, who would soon go on to become an important director himself and cast Wakao in leading roles in no less than 20 of his films. The picture really belongs to Chikage Awashima, though. I’ve seen her in quite a few films, but often in supporting roles; she really rises to the occasion here, giving a memorable portrait of a fragile and emotionally-needy woman doomed to attract the wrong kind of man.

 

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[1] Izumi was also responsible for the originals on which Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Downfall of Osen (1934), Masahiro Shinoda’s and Takashi Miike’s versions of Demon Pond (1979 and 2005) and Seijun Suzuki’s Kagero-za (1981) were based. Nihonbashi remains untranslated, but the University of Hawaii Press have published two collections of his stories in English.

 

[2] The play starred male actor Shotaro Hanayagi in the leading female part. Hanayagi made a handful of movies in later years, most notably playing the lead in Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums.

 

Bonchi (The Son) / ぼんち (1960)

Obscure Japanese Film #15

Ayako Wakao and Raizo Ichikawa

Set in Osaka, Bonchi stars Raizo Ichikawa as Kikuji, a young womaniser who inherits his father’s tabi[1] business and has affairs with a number of women (including Ayako Wakao as an 18-year-old geisha with a taste for gaudy jewellery and Machiko Kyo as a teahouse hostess). His mother (Isuzu Yamada) and grandmother (Kikue Mori) are a couple of old connivers obsessed with appearances and tradition. For some reason I was unable to fathom, they kick his first wife (Tamao Nakamura) out when she gives birth to a baby boy. (According to other commentators, the two older women will only accept a female heir in order to maintain their tradition of matriarchal power; this may well be the case, but was unclear to me despite watching with good quality English subtitles). Anyway, their continual interference in Kikuji’s life prevents him from marrying again, and he eventually has a second son by Ponta (Wakao) out of wedlock. The story is told in flashback by a grey-haired Kikuji to a friend (Ganjiro Nakamura).

Ayako Wakao

 

Around two years prior to the production of Bonchi, Raizo Ichikawa had escaped his regular jidaigeki assignments to play the stuttering trainee monk turned arsonist in Conflagration, an adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion directed by Kon Ichikawa (no relation). Although the producers at Daiei had taken some convincing that he had been right for the part, the collaboration had been a happy one and the casting a success. Bonchi was a project based on a then recently-published novel and initiated by Raizo Ichikawa, who took it to Kon Ichikawa and asked him to direct. He agreed and asked his wife and regular screenwriter Natto Wada to adapt Toyoko Yamasaki’s book. 

Ayako Wakao and Raizo Ichikawa

 

The story is set mainly during the early Showa period (late 1920s), but Wada contributed the flashback structure and expanded the post-war scenes. This incurred the wrath of Yamasaki, who reportedly tried to stop production after filming had already begun. She subsequently became known for her studies of corruption in institutions in a number of novels which director Satsuo Yamamoto turned into successful films: The Great White Tower, The Family and The Barren Zone. (I wrote about the latter two in my Tatsuya Nakadai biography as he appeared in both. I also read the abridged English translation of The Barren Zone; the style suggested that Yamasaki was a writer of best-sellers rather than highbrow literature. An English translation of Bonchi appeared in the 1980s through various publishers). 

Kikue Mori and Isuzu Yamada

 

Bonchi seems to me to be a comedy rather than a drama, and the tone is light throughout, with a contemporary jazz score providing an ironic counterpoint to the proceedings. The film has a twist ending, but I have to say it’s a twist I completely failed to see the point in. Bonchi was not selected for release in the West at the time, and it’s not difficult to see why – some Japanese films are perhaps simply too Japanese to travel well. I would say this is a case in point as the story revolves around etiquette and traditions involving concubinage, etc, which I for one found somewhat baffling. Still, it’s a pleasure to watch such a great cast in a well-made film. The character was clearly close to Raizo Ichikawa’s heart, as he also played the role on stage the year the film was released. However, for me, the best performance is by Isuzu Yamada, who here vacillates between domineering malice and childlike sentimentality most convincingly.

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[1] Japanese socks which divide the big toe from the other four.