Last night I was fortunate to see a great movie, Miyazaki Hayao's new film, 2023's The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか, "How do You Live?"). It's an awesome work of melancholy, surreal fantasy and a courageous social commentary. Not to mention audacious in Japan's current political climate.
The film was already a curiosity before its release due to Miyazaki's decision not to advertise it beyond the publication of a single poster. Before seeing the movie, I'd concluded there were two possible motives behind Miyazaki's refusal to advertise the film as normal. Either it was a flex, to show just how far his name alone could carry a film, or it was a face-saving gesture, an excuse he could point to when the film didn't surpass the box office success of Kimetsu no Yaiba. Now that I've seen the film, I know it's neither. Miyazaki knew that many people in Japan, if they knew anything about the film's subject matter, would refuse to see it.
I saw an eight o'clock showing on opening night with an audience that filled about two thirds of the theatre. I live in Kashihara, a city in Nara prefecture, just east of Osaka and about an hour south of Kyoto by train. It's a very conservative part of a very conservative country. When the film ended, one woman applauded and I joined her. No-one else did. When I came home, I opened Twitter and found the movie was trending mostly with negative Japanese tweets about it.
There are several hot button issues in the film. The protagonist is mixed race and this plays directly into the story. The story is set during World War II and it promotes the value of individualistic thought over collectivist thinking.
We meet Mahito (Santoki Soma) when he awakens during an air raid in Tokyo. Fire is falling from the sky and he learns his mother isn't home, that she's in a part of town now engulfed in flames. We learn a lot about Mahito's personality right away when he first rushes out the door in his bedclothes but then stops in the street, hurriedly turns around, and goes back inside to get dressed in his uniform, then rushes back out, forgetting to put on his shoes. And we can surmise that Mahito is a boy so deeply conditioned to conform to rules and customs, he can't even make the decision to bypass them in an emergency. And in his haste, he forgets to put on the one piece of practical clothing prescribed by custom, his shoes.
After his mother's death, he and his father, who builds fighter planes (much like the protagonist of The Wind Rises and Miyazaki's real life father), move to the country. Mahito's father marries Natsuko, the younger sister of Mahito's mother. Mahito's difficulty at accepting a replacement mother is worsened by her carefree manners. She takes him to their new home where they're to live with several elderly aunts. It turns out Mahito's great uncle was a famous American architect. This, by the way, would be enough for Mahito himself not to be considered Japanese in Japan, where racial purity is still very important. There's plenty of evidence to show Mahito is dissatisfied with himself. He picks a fight at school and afterwards smashes himself in the head with a rock. Is it to make his opponent look worse, or is it just that Mahito had hoped for more pain and punishment from the fight than what he got?
Nearby, there's a fantastic, abandoned, western style mansion that was designed and built by Mahito's great-uncle. Since his arrival, Mahito has been pestered by a large heron that occasionally speaks and starts to take on human characteristics. It lures him into the old house with the promise that his mother still lives. Instead, both Mahito and the heron are accidentally transported to another world. This other world is filled with western structures and symbols, including massive forests of cypresses. Many shots resemble Arnold Bocklin's famous painting, "Isle of the Dead".
In addition to cypresses, Miyazaki gives us chiaroscuro clouds, much darker and more threatening than usual in his films. But the tone of the film, as Mahito finds himself searching the strange world not only for escape but also for Natsuko, remains placidly anxious. He encounters dead people, or people who've been presumed dead for years, and with the general tone it does feel like a land of the dead. It has a similar vibe to the train journey in Spirited Away.
The wound on Mahito's head continues to be significant as a symbol of his own nature and how he feels about himself. The visual of gushing blood is continually repeated. In one scene, the blood is recalled when his face is covered in jam. And blood becomes important in the sense of inheritance when Mahito encounters his great uncle, who now lives in this world like Prospero, having apparently created it and bound its denizens to his service. His relationship with his daughter, Himi, a fire witch and possible incarnation of Mahito's mother, recalls Prospero's relationship with Miranda as well as the relationship between Odin and Brunhilde, the latter more directly referenced by Miyazaki in Ponyo.
There's a wonderfully creepy military of giant parakeets who seem intended to satirise the Imperial Japanese military. I loved a scene where Mahito is captured by them and he finds himself surrounded in a quiet house. The only sound we hear is of the birds loudly breathing through their nostrils. It's very creepy and weird.
As usual, the Japanese title is much more evocative than the English title. It doesn't quite translate, though--君たち, "kimitachi", is a plural "you" like we don't have in English, except informally, as in "you guys" or "you all". This is a significant point in a story that's about collectivism versus individualism. It's also a reference to a 1937 novel of the same name, a novel which also makes a similar point about individual thought, and which was hated by the contemporaneous regime.
This isn't a film that awkwardly pushes a message. It renders a world brilliantly and establishes a sense of experience. It's not a movie about answers but about the epiphany that life is full of unpredictable ambiguities, unreliable comforts, and inevitable death. The elusive and ephemeral qualities of life's comforts make attempts to impose order seem especially destructive. The film takes its time but every time a character leaves, whenever something ends, you miss it, and you're left feeling struck by how easily things can slip away.
The Boy and the Heron is now in theatres in Japan.
No comments:
Post a Comment