Obscure Japanese Film #276
 |
| Shiro Osaka |
Fujimura (Shiro Osaka) is an unrepentant criminal released from prison only to find two yakuza whose money he has stolen waiting for him outside. He flees and boards a train bound for Yamashiro, but they follow him onto the train. However, Fujimura finds that he has a doppelganger among the passengers and manages to swap clothes with him while he’s asleep in an effort to shake off his pursuers. It works, but when Fujimura reaches Yamashiro he realises that Bunpei Sagara (also played by Osaka), the man whose identity he has assumed, is a representative from the Ministry of Education whose mission is to deliver a lecture on the importance of morality and decide if the town is worthy of receiving a 10 million yen grant. The town’s VIPs queue up to kiss his butt and Fujimura continues to play the role of Sagara...
 |
| Yukio Mishima |
If the basic plot of this Nikkatsu production sounds familiar, that’s because it’s an uncredited reworking of Gogol’s play The Government Inspector. However, the credited source is a series of essays by Yukio Mishima originally published in the weekly magazine Shukan Myojo, so it was presumably the screenplay authors (Atsundo Kubota* and director Katsumi Nishikawa) who came up with the idea of raiding Gogol for the storyline. The film retains the title of the essay series which, according to Japanese Wikipedia, ‘is modelled after Ihara Saikaku’s Twenty Unfilial Acts of Japan, which parodies the Chinese Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety and contains carefully selected stories of “unfilial children”.’ Mishima’s essays, which were later collected in book form, have yet to appear in English, but were, apparently, humorous attacks on the hypocrisies of the time. In any case, he clearly approved of the film as he even appears in it as himself in a brief prologue and epilogue.
 |
| Hiroyuki Nagato |
The upright facade presented by the town of Yamashiro soon proves to be a complete sham, and the place is populated largely by amoral eccentrics: two young students plotting the perfect murder, a high school girl raffling off her virginity, a middle-aged Christian housewife (Chieko Misaki) fantasising about her young muscleman driver, an anti-moral education protest group, and a nerd who claims to be a lady-killer (Pigs and Battleships’ Hiroyuki Nagato).
 |
| Yumeji Tsukioka |
The biggest star in the film, Yumeji Tsukioka, is absent for most of the picture but plays a TV star returning to her hometown to think about her future, while leading actor Shiro Osaka was usually found further down the cast list but acquits himself well in the comic double role. Director Nishikawa seems quite at home with all the absurdist comedy and keeps things moving at a steady pace.
 |
| Shiro Osaka |
*Sometimes incorrectly translated as Atsuto Kubota.
If you'd like to support this blog, you can Buy Me a Coffee.
 |
| Chieko Masaki |
No comments:
Post a Comment