Shûichi Okita 2013 Japan
Starring: Kengo Kôra, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Gô Ayano, Sôsuke Ikematsu, Ayumi Ito
Shûichi Okita's Yokomichi Yonosuke, the tale of the life of a student in late 80's Tokyo, is a very odd film but not in the way you may expect, its central oddness deriving not chiefly from its narrative (or at least the small amount we're given, this is after all a pretty bare bones story) but from the presentation of it. Here director Shûichi Okita seems to go all around the houses in terms of style but never really gets down to what perhaps should be his main purpose, namely constructing a comprehensible story, instead handing us a seemingly random series of vignettes from the main character Yonosuke's daily life that skip days, weeks and sometimes decades and feature characters that wander in and out - a hippie uncle flitting between dancing and despair here, a steely, larcenous possible prostitute there - before disappearing completely without much in the way of major rationale or even a reason to exist at all. On a couple of occasions we even start following previously unseen people through their own mini-plot and it takes a couple of minutes before it's finally revealed that they are the future selves of minor characters in the main story suddenly remembering Yonosuke years down the line but again never offering any concrete insight on the samba dancing scholar. The rest of the film doesn't give us much either, other than that people find his name inexplicably hilarious. For his part Kengo Kôra (playing Yonosuke) seems pretty confused too and carries the same baffled look my niece gets when she tries to understand the rules of rugby union. It isn't even that his or anyone else's acting is particularly poor, it's just that other than being polite he's not that likeable or even entertaining. No one is really and it says something about the film (and perhaps me) that the only actual relatable character is Yuriko Yoshitaka's excitable love interest Shoko and she's a borderline sociopath. I don't know that you could even call the film lovably odd because, for the most part, it isn't lovable in any way, in fact at its worst it's frustrating, unnecessarily bizarre, slapdash and just plain dull. There are a couple of interesting moments and a twist in the plot late on that looks like it may turn things around slightly but overall they all lead to nothing. Likewise, water is a recurring theme but it's never expanded further than a few appearances and an admittedly creative scene that opens on a POV shot of the inside of a car while it's going through a car wash, and just as with the rest of the film we're not given any sort of explanation or even a narrative link to tell us why it's there. It's just another case of what could feasibly be an intended enigma turning out to be wholly wearisome. Still perhaps the biggest mystery is how the film got made at all. I mean, three hours of sprawling nonsense could plausibly get green-lit if they were being proposed as a vanity project by a director who had had a long history of hits and a smorgasbord of frequent themes that could be woven in but this is only Okita's forth feature and of those four only 2011's good if spare The Woodsman And The Rain was a success (and a modest one at that). Maybe he's pitching for a new career, sort of saying "I can convince people to give me money and let me make a great, fetid buffalo bullock like this, I'd be a great executive fixer'. I can only hope that's the case because I'm not keen to sit through another three hours of his hokum.
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