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.