Time Contributor | County Howe
Older youth in a cinema.
This year, this Japanese movie won hemp!
At the Japan Academy Awards in March, the film won 8 awards (13 nominations) including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor.
"A Man"
The Japan Academy Film Awards are also known as the "Japanese Oscar", and from the academy's point of view, this is the best Japanese film in 2022.
The film is in YAHOO! Picture Picture received a score of 3.7, with a 4- and 5-star rating of 65%, and a score of 4.1 (out of 5.0) on Movie Walker.
Japanese audiences say this -
Although it will become very painful after watching it, it is a very good movie that makes people think.
A shell of suspense
The creative team of "A Certain Man" is very strong.
Director Keisuke Ishikawa and screenwriter Yasuke Mukai have collaborated on the crime suspense film "Foolish Travel", the bus scene in the opening minutes of this movie, through continuous reversal, the limit outlines the discord of human nature, which shows the sophistication of skills.
Yasuke Mukai is also a screenwriter for the Japanese drama "Late Night Canteen" series, the Japanese film "She at the Sun", "Tamago who does not seek advancement" and other screenwriters, and has rich creative experience.
Film photography Kondo Ryūhito, who has served as a photographer for classic Japanese shadows such as "Thief Family" and "Yokomichi Senosuke".
"Thief Family" & "Yokomichi Senosuke"
In addition to the male and female protagonists of his wife and husband Satoshi Ki and Sakura Ando, the film actors also include the Japanese Drama Academy Award young TV emperor Masataka ("For N", "Unnatural Death"), the Japanese Film Academy Award actor and old drama bone handle Akira ("Hansawa Naoki 2", "The Life of the Disliked Matsuko") and so on.
The film is adapted from the original book of the same name by Japanese post-75 writer and musician Keiichiro Hirano.
Known as "Yukio Mishima's reincarnation", he won the Wasagawa Prize (Japan's highest prize for pure literature) for his novel "Eclipse" at the age of 24, and his work is extremely speculative, which is also reflected in the story "A Man".
Koichiro Hirano
On the surface, "A Certain Man" is a suspense film.
Rieda Takemoto (played by Sakura Ando), who lost her husband and lives with her son and mother-in-law, runs a stationery store.
One day, Daisuke Taniguchi (played by Masataka Wata), a mysterious man who loves painting, enters the store to shop, and a spark of love breeds with Rieda.
The two soon confirmed their relationship and got married, and after marriage, they gave birth to a daughter, and when their lives were on track, Dayou, who worked for a wood company, was accidentally hit by a giant wood and died.
Kyoichi, the elder brother of Daisuke, who came to mourn but never appeared before, insisted that the deceased was not Daisuke after seeing the posthumous photos.
So, who is the man who has been living with Rieda?
In order to find out the true identity of her late husband, Rieda invited lawyer Akira Jodo (played by his wife and husband Satoshi Mu) to entrust him to investigate the truth.
During the investigation, Jodo gradually discovered that Mr. X, who called himself "Daisuke Taniguchi", may have a very unbearable past, and exchanging his account and name with others is to completely abandon the past years and start a new life with a flawless appearance.
At the same time, Johto began to examine his status as a lawyer.
Behind the harmony of husband and wife, the cute son, and the solid family background, will he be just another Taniguchi Daisuke?
From the perspective of the storyline, the entire movie is driven by such suspense.
But suspense is just the shell of "A Certain Man".
The Charm of the Shadow of the Sun
The purpose of the director and screenwriter is not to reveal the truth, but to create a new expression of Japanese cinema in the process of pushing the truth.
This expression is divided into two parts, one part, which is a common element of Japanese cinema, and the other, which is a fresh element of Japanese cinema.
Common elements refer to stationery, logging, and boxing.
Rieda and Osuke bond over stationery.
Stationery is a unique part of Japanese culture, and each year, the "Oscars of Stationery" Japan Stationery Awards select pieces with amazing designs to cope with a digital age where complex stationery is increasingly no longer needed.
The logging scene in the film is reminiscent of the high-scoring comedy "Oh Ah God Goes to the Village" starring Masuta Someya.
"Oh Oh God Goes to the Village"
The original presentation of the wood industry in both films hooks up a unique "marriage" between Japanese literature and nature.
As for boxing, audiences familiar with Japanese movies should be surprised.
"Hundred Dollar Love", "Blue", "Ah, Wilderness" (first and second chapters), and "Keiko, Gaze", which competed on the same stage with "A Man" at the Academy Awards, are all boxing themes.
"Ah, Wilderness" (Part II)
Japanese boxing movies are often not outward, but very restrained, even if hot-blooded, not thin, but undercurrent, they will blur the boundaries between gender and boxing, and life and boxing, so as to make the daily nature of boxing clearer.
Therefore, in Japanese boxing movies, the character's desire for the ring is often not to win or lose, but just to stand up.
In "A Man", the fake Dayou once said to his coach: Can I really stand in such a bright place (pointing to the ring)?
In addition to stationery, logging, boxing, which are common elements of the Japanese shadow, "A Certain Man" introduces a new element that is difficult to see in the Japanese shadow.
That is, the identity of immigrants.
In recent years, North American film and television have excavated and discussed the identity of American immigrants in an all-round way through works such as "Minari", "Paches Game", "Instantaneous Universe", and "Angry Life".
After that, there were also big productions such as "The Sympathizer" (a Vietnamese spy American drama directed by Park Chan-wook).
"The Sympathizer"
But there are very few such themes in Japanese movies.
In "A Man", Akira Jodo is a descendant of Korean descent in Japan who starts a family with a Japanese woman.
The few times he is angry in the film are because of his positioning, from the identity of the Japanese husband to the identity of the border between Japan and South Korea.
The screenwriter wrote a typical plot -
Jodo sat on the sofa and meditated, his son Satoshi kept repeating the Japanese "hachiga" behind his back, and when his son accidentally knocked over Jodo's wine glass, Jodo finally broke out and lost his temper with his son.
This loss of control is not aimed at the wine glass that overturned on the document, but at the son's ease of being completely immersed in the Japanese language as a Japanese without identity confusion.
The pain of the past
In addition to identity, there are many other connotations in "A Man".
For example, in the film, a young man committed suicide due to overwork, and Akira Joto's father-in-law commented -
If you really feel that the work is hard, can you choose not to do it?
The State spends money on net useless areas (meaning compensation for relatives who commit suicide).
They obviously have the ability to support themselves but can live on taxes, so what do they usually do? Just play slots!
The vested interests of the social class are not willing to put themselves in the shoes of the young people at the bottom, but are only willing to criticize and point out from a high place.
This is actually a common phenomenon in the entire East Asian society.
In the story of the true and false Dayou, the film deeply explores the impact of the original family, the shadow of patriarchy, and the painful past.
The fake Daisuke's real name is Makoto Kobayashi, and his father Kenkichi Kobayashi is the murderer of a massacre.
Makoto Hara, the son of a death row prisoner, has suffered social discrimination, reminiscent of his brother in Keigo Higashino's novel "Letter".
The younger brother asked his brother not to write letters from prison because they constantly reminded him and society that this was a relative of the murderer.
Yuan Cheng could not break away from his father's shadow, and reflected the expression in the recent Iranian film "Gold Coin Gray and Yellow" -
The authoritarian father dies at the end, and the daughter, who has been trying to pull the whole family out of the mud, laughs with tears in her eyes, and finally, the family can breathe relatively freely.
Yuan Cheng left the boxing world and turned into a blockbuster to become a lumberjack, which is reminiscent of what Shen Mo said to Wang Yang in the Chinese drama "Long Season" -
Go to a place no one knows and live again.
Therefore, there are too many shadows of people in Kobayashi Hara, and it can even be said that he is a complex of Asians who are trapped in the past and yearn for a new life.
The image of the heroine Rieda is also very moving.
After the truth was revealed, Rieda told Jodo:
It is an indelible fact that you met, fell in love, lived together, and gave birth to a little flower with him (the fake Daisuke) in this town.
Unlike Makoto Hara's attempt to erase the past, Rieda firmly identifies with every life experience she has, which is a true feminism.
In connection with the female pioneer Chizuko Ueno who was questioned some time ago for revealing marriage, Rieda's answer can be described as sonorous: marriage, singleness, pain, happiness, these are women's choices, and they do not conflict with each other.
Marriage is not incompatible with feminism, and being single is not a feminist banner.
What matters is not gender and whether or not to enter into marriage, but whether the personality is independent or not. Like Rieda, it has the power to take on any change in life.
All of the above is the reason why "A Certain Man" swept the Academy Awards.
This movie may be slow-paced, but the power of the undercurrent is still worth savoring.