Real (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2013)

[repeat]

The HK disc of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Real," released by Panorama. -- I don't know how this film was shot, but the picture looks suspiciously smooth. I don't see any artifacts one would associate with horrid DNR, but the smoothness creeps me out. I haven't had time to look at this properly, or watch the movie, but it looks like a return to good form and the engrossing interest of Kurosawa films of years past.

Hard to say without seeing, but sounds like it could be pretty much the way it looked on the DCP. I'm not an expert in the technicalities of post-production, but there was a decidedly "unreal" sheen to it that's probably a combination of HD digital video, unnaturalistic lighting schemes and color desaturation in post. Looking forward to reading what you thought of the film when you get around to it!

[feihong]

So I watched Real, finally, and I'm no clearer about the technical composition of the disc. If the film was indeed shot in HD video, with a lot of post-production--which is what it looked like--then the absence of both grain and DNR makes sense. There's no ghosting or the the kind of artifact drag you sometimes see with sources that have been DNRed until they're completely smooth. Edges of figures are sharp, and movement is clean. And yet the image is completely smooth, and without any really extensive depth of field. Since depth is one of the reasons I like upgrading films to blu-ray, this is a bit of a disappointment. But if the film is shot in DV anyway, that could account for the relative flatness of the image. It's not totally flat; it's just not deep the way a 35mm film can be.


As for the movie itself...I think that the subconscious logic of the premise catches itself up and comes unravelled for me. It was nice to see elements of Kurosawa's signature style back on screen. I wasn't disappointed in the thorough, absolutely blighted and immediate way I was when I saw Tokyo Sonata, but...starting a little over halfway through it began to feel like "Kurosawa light," and at the same time the picture started to split violently into a promising, intriguing first half and a wretched, irredeemable second half. I'll have to do the spoiler tag to cover up the plot details:

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I was quite disappointed when the twist came and it turned out that it wasn't about the girl in the coma at all, and that in fact the boy was a) the one in the coma, b) the creatively blocked manga artist, c) the one tormented by childhood guilt, and drawn into horror manga as a result. To me this twist sabotages most of the considerable interest which the film has built up until that point. Here are the things which I feel happens as a result of turning the premise on its ear at that late midway point:

1) The character of the girl is completely jettisoned. All of her dynamic, interesting characteristics, it turns out, don't belong to her. Instead, we're essentially seeing the guy's characteristics, mapped out onto his own phantom projection of her. So if the girl isn't an obsessive, neurotic, creatively-blocked manga artist, what is she? She doesn't seem to have any particular characteristics at all. The boy works in a gym in his initial fantasy world. Who does that corresponding job in reality? It doesn't look as if the girl is some sort of fitness instructor. In fact, once the plot twist is effected, every way we've come to know the girl is rendered invalid, and none of her characterization is filled in subsequently.

2) There's nothing special about a guy who draws grotesque horror manga. When it was the girl doing it, the narrative merited considerable more attention and involvement. Why the girl might be driven to do something like that is worth knowing. But when it turns out to be the guy, the manga genre becomes immaterial, since there are males working avidly in every genre of manga. Consequently, the hideous, mutilated bodies the guy has been seeing cease to appear entirely after the plot twist. So the mangled corpses are only a figment of the guy's imagination when he imagines that his girlfriend imagines them? As a figment of her imagination? What kind of twisted psyche is that? Does this guy actually know his girlfriend? Is she capable of thinking that way? When we get back to the real world, the guy's actual girlfriend doesn't seem to possess even a kernel of darkness in her soul. She's an uncomplicated, true-blue crusader, trying to keep her boyfriend from slipping away into that good night. This brings me to my main point:

3) The potential richer subtext of the story--that this essentially caring and attentive boyfriend might have to learn a great deal of heretofore unsuspected things about his girlfriend before he can bring her back to deal with him in the real world--gets thoroughly demolished. We're no longer plumbing the psyche of a tortured girl in the second part of the movie; instead, we're plumbing the psyche of a rather pathetically guilt-ridden guy. So now, instead of challenging this guy to pursue the hidden depths of the women he thinks he knows so well, we're instead just digging out a hoary "I saw something nasty in the woodshed" bit of "intrigue" about a semi-superficial guy, who isn't even coy enough to bury the memory of the dead kid he feels guilty over. He sees the kid in the halls, and he draws comics in which the boy dies again and again for the world to see. This is a less compelling character. Rather than being a unique individual operating from an oft-overlooked social position--i.e., a woman doing horror manga and driven to suicide by something ordinary in her everyday life--this is just some guy this coma just happened to happen to. He didn't seek out the coma (we believe the girl did, because we're operating under the assumption that she tried to kill herself), and he's not working out some deep disquiet--it's just that he's oversensitive about his childhood experiences, and he needs to talk about them with his girlfriend.

4) These experiences that bother the guy ARE ALL SHARED BY HIS GIRLFRIEND. The part about this that is really extremely weird is that the girl really does seem to have blocked out the pleisiosaur-boy's death entirely, while the guy--I guess his name was Koichi--has only lightly repressed it. He's constantly crying out his guilt to the world, and his girlfriend can't be bothered to decode his distress until...until he's in a probably-fatal coma? She was right there when all this shit went down, but she doesn't feel ANY accompanying guilt--not even enough to recall that this traumatic event happened--until it practically plays out in front of her when she's in Koichi's subconscious. Then she's suddenly like, "oh yeah; we watched that kid die together. That's what you're upset about? That's why you won't wake up from this coma?" This part seems wildly incongruous to me, unless Kurosawa is trying to point out that the island people deal with death in the ocean, out by the buoys as something common, while Koichi, a city-boy, is ruined for his whole life by witnessing it once. Also, this kid was not a friend. This kid was very close to being an enemy of Koichi. So how did this event scar Koichi in this enormously indistinct, entropic way? And how come his girlfriend shares not one little bit of his angst, when she bore witness to the exact same tragedy?

When I think about the film this way, it starts to fall apart completely. I don't think the performances in this film are up to the caliber of Loft or Bright Future ( I felt the same about Tokyo Sonata). The direction of the picture seems...well, it has style, and Kurosawa's creative way of visualizing a picture, but...until Tokyo Sonata I never felt like that style was superficial, or detachable from thematic interest. The Kiyoshi Kurosawa of the past seemed to be a literate, intelligent controller of his own subject matter; a director as conscious of his themes as he was of his tone, of the pitch of his performances and the movement of his camera. He seemed to know when he was implying something interesting--in fact, in interviews he was fairly open about how he did that. But in the last couple of pictures, Kurosawa's work seems to be far more coarse than anything I saw of him before. To me, this film, and Tokyo Sonata, are far cruder and more ill-judged than Kandagawa River Pervert Wars--an extremely early film in Kurosawa's career, and one in which which he seemed to understand implicitly the tone he was going for, the pitch of the performances...and the earlier films once throbbed with the delicate harmonies of the uncanny. The more recent films have jangled discordantly, with superficial performances--like in this movie--or with ridiculous implausibilities--like in Tokyo Sonata (how does the kid learn to play the piano so well, so fast? And why on earth does Koji Yakusho appear as the world's worst burglar?).

As for this film by itself, I think the transformation of "the girl" into "the girlfriend" just ruins the picture. It's especially disappointing since up until that time, the movie seemed to be firing on all cylinders. I wonder how Kurosawa himself feels about this film? I wonder if the twist was always meant to be in the film? Did Kurosawa want it to be there? He has told stories based on interesting women in the past. He seemed to be doing that again for about a hour and 10 minutes or so of this movie. On the other hand, this film clearly offers the chance to do some crazy dinosaur special effects, and that might just be too big a lure for any imaginative filmmaker to pass up.

The film did remind me of a great deal of modern Japanese novels, manga and films, in which personal neuroses stand in to shoulder larger social wrongs (especially the way Koichi's guild about the island boy drowning is wrapped up in his head with his larger sense that the resort complex his father was building on the island ended up a failure and a ruin for the islanders). One such novel I was reminded of was Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, where the sins of Japan's WWII imperialist ideals and those of Japan's late-20th-century capitalist economic and political "wrongs" are shouldered and at least partly excoriated by one corporate-downsized salaryman who has lost his cat. That's also a novel in which the same man's wife leaves him, and he goes into a kind of sensory-deprivation/unorthodox personal research journey to find out where she is and how to get her back.

Along the way, the hero, Toru Okada, has stories told to him about his wife, her brother, their ancestors, people who have had interactions with the wife, with the brother, with their ancestors. He hears parables that have some correlation, and which help him understand his wife's mindset, her history, her family background. He comes to realize his wife is a far more multifaceted person than he can credit or recall. Toru gradually discovers his wife has been chronically unfaithful to him, that his wife is dominated by her own brother--a genuine force of evil who seems to be able to draw the center, or essence, out of a woman by sexually violating her--but Toru also realizes that he abandoned his wife emotionally when she was pregnant, and they were deciding whether or not to keep the child. He realizes that he has only related to his wife in a couple of basic, even superficial ways (this is one of the more potent strands of what is a much more expansive story, but this element of it is apropos when talking about Real). Ultimately, Toru discovers a free-associative, sensory-deprivation method of freeing his wife from her enslavement and winning her back. In the end of the novel, Toru waits to be reunited with this woman he hardly knew, but whom he now knows so much about. We feel as if he has achieved understanding, regained a certain potency, and that he'll be able to genuinely understand his wife for maybe the first time (she is bound for jail at the conclusion of the story, and he'll have to get to know her during visiting hours, but that's another aspect of the story not useful here).

That thematic material is rich and luminous--maybe moreso than Murakami realizes (Murakami has often proved himself a poor writer of women when he attempts to write from a first-person female perspective)--but the author doesn't cheat on the development of the theme, and it turns out to be a really rich vein of the novel; one that repays close attention. The first half of Real felt as if it was pushing to work on that very theme, and it was very exciting to see the way in which that would develop. Once the twist takes place, and our attention shifts away from the girl, towards her boyfriend, that thematic material loses its hold, and is no longer applicable. It's a terrible loss to the movie, and so the second part of Real is far less necessary and far more ham-fisted in its attempts at thematic development. I'm afraid it left me pretty frustrated.

[FerdinandGriffon]

As for the movie itself...I think that the subconscious logic of the premise catches itself up and comes unravelled for me.

I'd have to see the film again to fully respond to your comments, as it's been a few months, and there are too many twists and turns to keep track for for that long. However, I know that, once these twists and inversions started to occur, I soon gave up on empirically identifying, the objective, exterior, "real" elements of the narrative, and began to assume that everything we were seeing was, to some degree or another, through the distorted viewpoint of our protagonist, and in most cases a complete fabrication.

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When you do this, suddenly everything in the film becomes precious; one can't afford to jettison the girl's characteristics, as you know that they belong to the protagonist, even if he's not willing to accept them as his. If she becomes "an uncomplicated, true-blue crusader" it's because he wants her to be, and this is something important to know about him. Like Inception, which Real is indebted to, this is a film that's not willing to resolve all of it's protagonists traumas neatly, that allows for a sense of progression while reserving the possibility that the goal will never be reached in full. I'd say this is often true of Murakami's writing too. His interchangeable "boku" protagonists attempt many of the same Sisyphean tasks from novel to novel, whether cooking spaghetti or rescuing friends from wells, and they rarely seem to come out much better for them, usually just having managed to survive and return to their quotidian existence. The Rat trilogy, in my opinion his greatest work, makes this point most strikingly, with the hero's traumas resolving at the end of each novel only to relapse in the next with greater intensity, scale, and complexity.

It was actually when the twist happened that the film became alive for me, where previously it had seemed to be edging towards melodrama or a straightforward rehash of the many "bland hero valiantly tries and fails to save beautiful but crazy woman" stories. And I don't think I understand why you found Kurosawa's style superficial or coarse here, or in Tokyo Sonata for that matter. If anything, the latter seemed to be a profound confirmation of Kurosawa's powers. It proved that his style was not simply a po-mo update of various genre conventions, that it could be focused on a "non-genre" setting and story and induce the same unease, beauty, and discordance, without supernatural assistance.

Also, discordance. Hasn't this always been a building block of his style? The silly string in House of Bugs, the bright musical cues in Cure or Charisma, the split screen in Doppelganger: are these missteps, or the gracenotes of a wonderfully unusual director? Though Kandagawa has its merits, I think Kurosawa has come a long way since that film (and remains there, Shokuzai aside). The performances in Real are not great, on their own terms, but they are functional, and excepting Koji Yakusho and the main cast of Tokyo Sonata, I'd say this is par for the course in his films. And Real seems a huge step forward for Kurosawa in terms of how he uses digital. Again and again he finds ways to use it's peculiar textures and qualities to create effects as unsettling as those he's previously induced from film. Though I'll always miss the dimly lit interiors of his earlier work, the waxy-sheened exteriors of the new have their own pleasures.

[warren oates]

Have to agree with feihong on Real:

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As for this film by itself, I think the transformation of "the girl" into "the girlfriend" just ruins the picture. It's especially disappointing since up until that time, the movie seemed to be firing on all cylinders. ...I wonder if the twist was always meant to be in the film? Did Kurosawa want it to be there? He has told stories based on interesting women in the past. He seemed to be doing that again for about a hour and 10 minutes or so of this movie.

For about 70-100 minutes, the film is pretty great, but then there's the huge twist. And in the final ten minutes everything just goes psychotronically off the rails. But before that it was one of the better virtual reality films I've seen, where the mind itself functions as both mysterious matrix and haunted house. Far more interesting than, say, The Cell or Vanishing Waves. Much more in line with influences like Wild Strawberries and Inland Empire and more related to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's best earlier work like Cure, Seance and Pulse.

[feihong]

However, I know that, once these twists and inversions started to occur, I soon gave up on empirically identifying, the objective, exterior, "real" elements of the narrative, and began to assume that everything we were seeing was, to some degree or another, through the distorted viewpoint of our protagonist, and in most cases a complete fabrication.

I don't understand why you'd assume that all elements of the film took place in the protagonist's head. Just because it turns out to be the one protagonist and not the other doesn't mean that the film has given up on any sort of objective reality. It seems to me much more sensible to assume that once the twist goes down, that the girl diving into the protagonist's subconscious is the real girlfriend.

When you do this, suddenly everything in the film becomes precious; one can't afford to jettison the girl's characteristics, as you know that they belong to the protagonist, even if he's not willing to accept them as his.

I'm not saying that I--alone in my mind--jettison the girl's characterization once the twist in the film occurs; I'm saying that the movie does that. The application of the particular plot twist invalidates the girl's previous characterization, because it's actually characterization belonging to another character. And what I'm saying is that it's pretty lame that the girl loses that personality, because I found her personality interesting and worthwhile; so long as it was hers. If all of her characterization actually belongs to the guy, then that same characterization is less worthwhile for me.

In both "Real" and "Tokyo Sonata" I definitely see a coarsening in Kurosawa's control over tone. It's especially weird to me because before I would have said that Kurosawa was a master of tone, subtly controlling his movies narrative and thematic "pitch" and "vibrato." A film like "Loft" especially benefits from that control--since the very idea of a mummy movie is potentially very silly, the fact that Kurosawa could infuse the subject matter with guilt and dread and play it essentially straight is pretty laudable. And pictures like "Charisma," "License to Live," and "Bright Future" balance really offbeat, black humor with so many other moods and atmospheres--each of these films has a special tonal palette which belongs to no other picture. So what's happened, I don't really totally understand. Potentially, Kurosawa's subject matter is richer for having moved out of genre territory. But the narrative twists and turns in his recent movies seem to disrupt the tone and atmosphere of the pictures profoundly, and these lapses in judgement or craft or taste ripple outwards like the current made by a pebble in a pond. In Tokyo Sonata, the creeping darkness of the husband's storyline, the wife's kidnap, the son's sudden ability to play exceptional piano from basically nothing; each of these plot movements and reveals strike me not as blackly humorous, or satirical, and not exactly serious. The presence of these bits in the whole of the film feel more like a disruption than a complement to the film's thematic development. "Real" has tons of problems for me, which I went into in some detail already. Safe to say, I think they disrupt the tone and the thematic progression of the film in ways from which the picture does not recover.

Discordance has been used a lot by Kurosawa in...I would say probably all his films. But the degree to which that discordance is modulated varies depending on the style and the subject matter. And it feels deliberate when the discordance is made visible to us in those earlier films. When "Real" feels discordant, it really feels unintentional. The horror films especially had black comedy that was measured very adroitly against the unease, disquiet, or outright terror in the pictures. The absurdly bonkers comedy in "Kandagawa River Pervert Wars" is very suited to the grotesque sexual gamesmanship that runs throughout the film. The discordance in "Real" comes from a clash between what it could have been and what it turns out to be, and it's not an intellectually engaging or exciting clash. It's the kind of picture where you thought it was going to be one thing, and the film was doing a good job selling you on that for an hour or more, and then the picture shifted gears abruptly and sabotaged everything it appeared to be geared to achieve.

As for the performances, I think there are many very special performances throughout Kurosawa's career. Not just Yakusho does well in his films, but in fact many other lead and supporting players in Kurosawa's pictures are as precise and exemplary. Yakusho isn't the only actor doing great in "Cure," for example: Masato Hagiwara, who plays the amnesiac, is entirely chilling, frustrating, comanding--he takes a notional role and gives it an absurdly convincing rhythm. When the actors appear uninspired, it's often because the script is pedantic (a lot of scenes in "Pulse" came off extremely flat--but they were written that way for starters). The actors in "Real" seemed to be doing quite well: I was sold on the neurotic fragility of the girl, the pressures upon her as a woman trying to maintain a manga career and have a romantic personal life. I bought the guy trying to be an exceptionally caring, attentive boyfriend, and I felt that there was some hollowness to that role for the character, which might lead to the development of some interesting drama. But when the major twist in the movie is fired off, and these characters swap identities (though maybe "swap" is a little unfair a term, as the girl really gets nothing in the trade-off), that potential dramatic development was invalidated from the ground up. The script went flat, and the acting became considerably less than the sum of its parts. Then the acting--intriguing up until that point--became rather bad. I don't think it's the performers fault, but rather a fault in the very premise of the picture.