In 2008, this festival showed the first four features by Ishii Yuya. He is back with an absurdist tragicomedy. Just like his parents, 17-year-old Norio wants to commit suicide. His teacher Akemi offers him another way out: flee to Tokyo to study to be a lawyer.
In 2008, this festival showed the first four features made by the young director Ishii Yuya at a high tempo. In the meantime his tempo has returned to normal; this is his first work since. Again, serious subjects are driven to absurdity. The suicide attempt of 17-year-old Norio, for instance: he plucks up courage to jump in the river when two classmates, with a kind of porn doll under their arms without head or upper body, wave at him without extending a hand. No: then maybe his teacher Akemi. She offers him another way out: flee to Tokyo, study very hard and become a lawyer. She pays, but in the meantime secretly has to work hard to pay the costs. It's a pity that Norio is not a real student. He prefers to spend his day with an orphaned kid who confuses him with a famous baseball player. A tragicomedy in which all parent child relationships are disrupted and even the Platonic love between Norio and Akemi can't be maintained.
PROGRAMMER NOTES
Ishii Yuya is young. He was born in 1983 and is not yet 27. At that stage, most film makers still have to make their first film. Ishii has however already made six. His first four films were screened here in Rotterdam, we are now presenting the fifth and I would have loved to have presented his sixth film Sawako Decides, were it not that it's being screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February.
Six films is an oeuvre. Then you can look at the characteristics and idiosyncracies is of a film maker.
Most important characteristics: the young Ishii has his very own view of his country, today's Japan outside Tokyo. That's why his films look ordinary yet very different. They are set in locations that do not look particularly spectacular. He searches for the most ordinary of places and then unusual things get done there serving to emphasise the ordinariness of the place. He made his film in Osaka, but has now moved to Tokyo for his studies.
Most important idiosyncrasy: he has a strange, occasionally bizarre, occasionally farcical form of humour. Good taste does not stand in his way. He allows his bright ideas to run riot and has not forgotten that he was himself an adolescent not so long ago.
Now let's hope that in his next six films he doesn't get too civilised.
GjZ