Obayashi Nobuhiko Capsule Reviews
Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast — July 10, 2018
Some thing like How Green Was My Valley meets No Greater Glory meets Moonrise Kingdom as directed by a young, angry Tsui Hark working for Hal Roach.
His Motorbike, Her Island — January 14, 2021
Extremely beautiful film probably made even more romantic by the fact that it’s impossible for me to see someone ride a motorcycle and not imagine them crashing into a fiery death at any moment.
The Rocking Horsemen — May 20, 2020
Clearly the best genre is “high school kids get together in a group to make some kind of art, usually but not necessarily music”. Linda Linda Linda, Sound! Euphonium, K-On!, Liz and the Bluebird, Bunheads, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, what I’ve seen so far of Kids on the Slope, and now The Rocking Horsemen. All perfect.
Hanagatami — July 19, 2018
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hanagatami is the kind of maximalist masterpiece that simply has to been seen. A story about the lives of young people in a remote village in Japan in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, it’s awash in the poetic dreams of youth, aswoon with love and death and poetry and moonlight. It’s unlike anything in contemporary cinema, the closest analogue in the English-speaking world is probably something like the early films of Guy Maddin, Archangel say, breathlessly romantic films as much in love with the artifice of cinema as the young characters are alive to all the extremes of life.
Toshihiko is a young man who comes to live with his aunt in the coastal village. At school he meets the dashing and intense Ukai, a handsome and athletic man who swims in the ocean at night, and the decrepit and intense Kira, a creepy guy who wears ratty green robes and walks with a cane. Attracted to the positive qualities of both men, Ukai’s physical vigor and Kira’s indomitable will, Toshihiko befriends them both, along with a trio of young women: Kira’s quiet cousin Chitose, the daughter of the local restaurant owner Akine, and Toshihiko’s cousin Mina, who is dying of tuberculosis. Mina’s name is significant, as the film, though based on a 1937 novel by Kazuo Dan, is as much an adaptation of Dracula as anything else, with the war and its all-consuming ideology as the vampire sucking the blood out of Japan’s youth.
Obayashi packs the film with wild edits, eschewing traditional shot/reverse-shot in favor of a kind of shot/mirror-shot, where he swaps the positions of characters in a two shot and then cuts between them during dialogue. It’s an eerie effect, even more disorienting than his more obviously anti-realist choices: elaborate painted backgrounds, vibrant colors, old style composite shots and multiple exposures. Throughout, the film is scored operatically, ever-rising to a pitch of emotionality that can’t possibly resolve itself happily. The effect is overwhelming, as crushingly desperate as the lives of teenagers who know that before them lies nothing but their collective doom.
Obayashi is mostly known here as the director of the cult horror film Hausu, but the only other one of his films I’ve seen is 1986’s Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast, which the Japan Society played as part of a retrospective on his films in 2015. I thought that film was crazy, but it isn’t half as audacious as Hanagatami. At 80 years old, Obayashi is still representing the best of what Japanese, and world, cinema has to offer.
Labyrinth of Cinema — June 30, 2020
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s final film, released just months before his death this past April, is, like his previous Hanagatamai, a maximalist expression of the great director’s pacifism and exuberant cinephilia. After a chaotic prologue setting up a night of music and movies on the last night of a theatre in Onomichi, Obayashi’s hometown and the setting for many of his films, three young men in the audience, a movie geek named “Mario Baba”, a note-taking, glasses-wearing historian of cinema named Hosuke, and a monk’s son turned wanna-be yakuza named Shigeru, are set adrift via the cinema on a trip through Japanese history from the civil war of 1868 that led to the end of the Shogunate and the birth of modern Japan, to the atom bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Obayashi, naturally, intersperses his historical storytelling with poems from the 1930s modernist Chuya Nakahara, commentary from a guy in sunglasses and shorts who flies a spaceship filled with floating fish, and asides about directors like Sadao Yamanaka and Yasujiro Ozu. The episodic narrative traces the near century of Japanese militarism that culminated in the disaster of World War II, putting the three audience stand-ins in the middle of the action (literally) while interrogating the role of movies in perpetuating the ideology of war. It’s basically like Histoire(s) du cinema, but made by a director who actually likes movies, and with a dash of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The stories, about a half dozen of them, run the gamut from bloody samurai actioners and bloodier samurai tragedies, to brutal stories of the WW2 Japanese army, to tales of love and the exploitation of women through prostitution, to the story of a theatrical troupe that almost made it out of Hiroshima before the bomb hit. They’re told in fits and starts, often beginning at the end and then doubling back on themselves, flashes forward and back and side to side from one story to another drawing connections more emotional than logical. The effect is overwhelming, as awe-inspiringly dizzying as it is nakedly sentimental and unfashionably pure of heart.
