Friday August 3, 2007
Lingering fear
By ALLAN KOAY
Renowned horror film director Kurosawa Kiyoshi is back with more scares, in Retribution.
You don’t go into a Kurosawa Kiyoshi film expecting easy answers. Most times, he provides you the pieces, and you have to fill in the blanks yourself.
Kurosawa had been making films and working in television long before his seminal 1997 thriller, Cure. That film, a surprisingly original take on the serial killer tale, became a festival favourite and won Kurosawa a whole new international legion of fans.
A policier set in a Tokyo where denizens looking for a “cure” end up with unexpected consequences, Cure is an endlessly fascinating puzzle that showcases Kurosawa’s concerns about social mores, the conflict between the modern and the traditional, and his distrust of contemporary life. These themes resurfaced in the technological horror, Pulse, and the social drama, Bright Future.
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Yakusho Koji plays Detective Yoshioka, who is haunted by a ghost in a red dress (Hazuki Riona) in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Retribution. |
And when Kurosawa lets loose his vengeful ghosts, they are not the usual kind that hide behind corners. They have a tendency to lean into the camera in extreme close-ups, their steely gaze cutting through you with an incisive chill.
Recently, the director took time off for an e-mail interview:
For Retribution, you seem to have gathered elements from your previous films, such as Cure and Pulse. Were there things in previous films that you felt you hadn’t fully explored?
In the sense that all three films deal with the large theme of contemporary Japan, I agree that they are similar. However, Retribution deals with the past far more significantly than the other two films.
In Cure, the past is delineated as the origin of a crime. Pulse does not deal with the past at all.
In Retribution, the past is portrayed as something that exists right on the other side of the present; the two are shown as constantly stuck together.
You have once again expressed a certain pessimism about contemporary life in Retribution. And this pessimism takes on an apocalyptic scale in your films. Where does this preoccupation come from?
I don’t think that my films are particularly pessimistic. Of course, they are not optimistic either. I always try to place myself in between the two so that I can allow the story to unfold as realistically as possible.
In Cure and Retribution, people commit murder as if it were second nature to them. Do we really have such a fragile hold on civilisation that we would slip into barbarity so easily, as shown in your films?
A murder is something that is interpreted as heinous, cruel or immoral after it takes place and is established as a crime. However, if you were there at the moment when the murder took place, isn’t it possible for it to take on an entirely different aspect?
What I always hope to depict in my films is not an interpretation but the different aspects and the texture of an event as it takes place.
The idea of being left behind or abandoned, as symbolised by the ghost and also the old building set against the backdrop of a modern and still developing Japan, is very interesting. Is the disparity between the old and the new very pronounced in Japan? Is that what inspired Retribution?
You are absolutely correct that Retribution is inspired by contemporary Japan. Current Japanese society tends to value the good aspects of our history while trying to negate the bad or the insignificant aspects.
But it is my understanding that the past which we consider “bad” or “insignificant” is what ultimately affects the psyche of contemporary Japanese people.
Most horror films tend to depict ghosts in fast cuts or only partially, but you’re not afraid to have the camera linger on your ghosts. Is this a reaction to the conventions of horror?
Every ghost in my film is played by a skilful actor, so his or her performances are always meticulous and humane. I feel that it would be such a shame to allow the audience to witness such a performance for only a few seconds and I simply cannot bring myself to do that.
Your protagonists always seem to be fighting the darker forces both within themselves and within society. Does this ambivalence stem from your own experiences?
I personally feel that I am an entirely harmless and good-natured citizen. However, when I envision the moment when the protagonist grasps the concept of “freedom”, somehow I always imagine that he will be in conflict with the morals and laws of society, one way or another.
In such a moment, a powerful drama is born out of the protagonist’s conflict between giving in to what is immoral or unlawful in order to claim that freedom or withhold from doing so.
You’ve said that Loft is a more personal film while Retribution is more of a commissioned work. What are the different challenges of working on these two films?
Both films were in equal parts commissioned by a producer and constructed from my original ideas. However, the biggest difference is that while in Loft, I tried to deviate from the genre of horror to go into melodrama. In Retribution, I tried to restrict myself within the confines of the horror genre.
I’ve shot numerous horror films in the past so both deviating from the genre as well as defending the purity of it was a personal challenge.
What, to you, is the attraction of horror, as opposed to other genres?
The attraction of the horror genre is that it allows you to treat “death” – a phenomenon that is interesting and mysterious to everyone – as the central theme of a story as well as show it as concrete visual representations. The fact that death is such a complex notion is, at the same time, the reason why the genre becomes so obscure.
What is your next project?
My next project will not be a horror film. Instead, I hope to make a film based on the story of an ordinary family living in contemporary Tokyo. If all goes well, I will be able to start shooting this fall.
Retribution, distributed by Golden Screen Cinemas, is showing in cinemas now.
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