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After 2015's "Galaxy Street", after four years, Mitani Yuki released her 11th film, "Not In Memory".
As a commemorative work of Fuji Television's 60th anniversary, this film is as star-studded as the previous "Mitani comedy".
Takaichi Nakai, an old drama who has worked with Mitani many times before, continues to play the leading role, and also brings together a number of powerful actors such as Indigo Fujioka, Eiko Koike, Yoshima Yoshida, Hiroichi Sato, Kei Tanaka, Jin Terajima, kano Kimura and so on.
The response to the film was very enthusiastic after its release in Japan. It topped the box office in the first weekend, and the box office performance rose all the way, and finally ranked eighth in the year with 3.64 billion yuan, while breaking the director's previous best box office work "Qingsu Meeting" of 2.96 billion yuan.
On Filmark, a well-known film rating website in Japan (similar to the domestic Douban), it also received a high score of 3.8 (out of 5 points), ranking the highest score among all the works of director Mitani.
In his previous works, Each of Mitani's works has experimented with different themes and spatial environments, from radio stations, hotels, courts to airports. This time, "Not In Memory" puts the stage in the prime minister's official residence, which is a political comedy.
Its setting is interesting: Keisuke Kuroda, the worst-supporting prime minister in history, was stoned in the head during a public speech, woke up from a hospital and lost his memory, forgetting that he was prime minister.
In order to prevent the news of the "prime minister's amnesia" from spreading and causing social unrest, the prime minister who has lost his memory has to adapt to this "new" and "strange" identity with the help of three loyal assistants.
片名「記憶にございません!」 It's actually from a line in the film, "I don't remember!" Mitsuya interprets it from a different perspective.
First, it is the prevarication of politicians facing criticism at meetings;
Secondly, it is also a description of the Prime Minister's amnesia.
When the amnesiac prime minister helplessly said this sentence at the meeting, the bureaucrats on the side were even more pregnant, some of whom thought that this was a generosity that did not blame their mistakes in the past, and some worried that this was the abrupt end of some previous conspiracy...
A simple statement elicited a fierce reaction from all sentient beings, and a good drama was staged.
Yuki Mitani is the man known as the "King of Heisei Comedy", which shows how high his status in the Japanese art world is.
▲ Yuki Mitani, once called by Japanese magazines as the entertainment master who successfully laughed at 1.3 billion Chinese...
Yuki Mitani, a screenwriter, founded his own troupe called Sunshine Boys when he was a student at the Faculty of Arts at Nippon University, which comes from Neil Simon's work of the same name.
Like Billy Wilder and Woody Allen, Neil Simon is one of Mitani's most respected comedy playwrights.
Neil Simon (1927-2018)
Despite the troupe's slump, Mitani invested all the money from his internship at the TV station during the same period into the Sunshine Boys.
Until the senior year, the troupe put "12 Kind Japanese" on the Japanese stage for performance, which attracted widespread attention from the society and made Mitani famous.
Mitani was based on the classic Hollywood film Twelve Angry Men (1957) and localized. He broke the tense rhythm of the original story and transformed it into a secret room comedy, which is refreshing and piercing the human nature in Japanese national culture.
▲ Sidney Lumet classic, "Twelve Angry Men"
This stage play was staged continuously from July 1990 to March 1991, almost full of scenes, attracting the attention of the producers, so in 1991 it was directed by Jun Nakahara to shoot the film of the same name, and won the screenwriting award of the 65th "Film Xunbao" and the 46th Daily Film Competition.
"12 Kind Japanese" became Mitani's first work to appear on the film screen, and since then it has kicked off Mitani's film and television drama creation career.
Since then, he has written a number of popular sitcoms for Japanese television, such as "Sure Still Like Cats" (1988), "Don't Call Me Prime Minister" (1997), "HR" (2002), as well as the hit series "Looking Back to See Him Again" (1993) and "Gentleman's Police" (1994).
▲ The "Furuta Renzaburo" series was written by Yuki Mitani, with an average of 9.4 per season
He is still active in the first line of TV series creation. Three years ago, the Ōkawa drama "Sanada Maru" (2016), and the previous Fuji Television's 50-year-old Taiwanese drama "The History of My Family" (2010) were written by him.
In 1997, Yuki Mitani first directed the film Radio Time.
"Radio Time" tells the story of two voice actors competing to play big names when recording radio dramas, resulting in the plot of the radio drama constantly being absurd and finally getting out of control. As a directorial debut, "Radio Time" was shortlisted for the top ten of the "Film Magazine" that year.
The creative experience of the stage drama makes it also reflect a strong stage style in the creation of the film.
Almost every film Mitani directs has rarely failed, and has become the darling of critics and audiences.
"The Top Sky Hotel" (2006) tells the story of the various people who gather in a large hotel before the cross-Chinese New Year's Eve;
"Big Airport 2013" (2013) photographs a family stranded at the airport due to plane delays;
Galaxy Street (2015) also features a restaurant in space as the stage for a strange array of alien diners.
These works are widely known for their strong theatrical style and exquisite multi-line narrative in a single space.
The stage play and film of the same name (2004), written by him, were adapted into a play "Comedy Of Sorrows" in 2011 and are well known to Chinese audiences.
Yuki Mitani is also a director with a deep fan of film, and he is deeply influenced by hollywood comedy masters.
Born in 1961, Mitani grew up in Japan's bubble economy and experienced the collapse of the Japanese studio system, catching up with the boom of independent production.
From the text of his works, it can be seen that the works of American comedy masters such as Billy Wilder, Ernst Liu Beiqian, Woody Allen and others, as well as other Hollywood classic films, have provided him with rich creative inspiration.
Billy Wilder (1906–2002)
The Hotel with the Roof is a distinct borrowing from the classic Hollywood comedy The Grand Hotel, and its hotel name is Avanti, taken from Billy Wilder's film of the same name, Avanti! (1972).
Yuki Mitani even borrowed the classic line from Casablanca (1942): "The universe is so big, why did she walk into my shop?"
All the architecture and characters in Magic Hour (2008) dress as if they were from the United States in the 1920s, and even the background music is somehow referenced to George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973).
There is also a classic scene of Miss Mary sitting on the moon singing, which can be seen as a replica of a scene from Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown (1999).
Further back, prototypes can also be found in Peter Bogdanovich's road comedy Paper Moon (1973) and Frank Capra's romantic comedy It Happened One Night (1934).
But in his bones, Mitani Yuki is actually a particularly local director, and he also reflects the inheritance of local culture.
During the time of Mitani's birth and growth, television spread rapidly in Japan, dealing a huge blow to the film industry.
At the same time, major film companies have also set their own development direction. Shochiku Daifune's tradition of writing about the people's feelings as a result of Yasujiro Ozu's series of family melodramas was passed on and carried forward by Yoji Yamada. The latter's 1969 series of Injiro's Tales was a huge success.
Unlike Ozu's focus on the middle class, Yoji Yamada focuses on small people such as marginal society and the people at the bottom, but also brings hope and warmth.
This type of folk comedy, which inherits the tolerant and free temperament of the japanese classical rakugo with regard to small people, is highly respected among Japanese audiences and influences Mitani's future comedy film creation.
▲Directed by Yoji Yamada
Similar to Yoji Yamada, Yuki Mitani also focuses his perspective on small people at the bottom or working class in Japan:
「...... On the contrary, it is not those who pry the earth, but ordinary people who work tirelessly for their livelihoods, and their diverse lives are wonderful and interesting."
In Mitani's comedies, most of the characters are "losers" in various social senses.
For example, the depressed dragon set actor in "Magic Moment", the gangster brother who faces death threats due to stealing love; the family who have their own hidden secrets in "Big Airport 2013" but are trapped at the airport by plane delays; the ordinary couple whose feelings and lives are on the verge of collapse in "Life Festival" (2011); the radio drama director in "Radio Time" who is overwhelmed by live broadcasting, and so on.
The charm of Mitani's works lies in the unique perspective of these "losers" or small people, and to dig out a positive, optimistic, and interesting life section.
Mitani Yuki did not shoot much in movies, and his energy was almost all devoted to the creation of stage plays.
He once told Kore-eda privately that movies and TV dramas are for the entertainment of the public, and only in stage dramas can you try what you want to do.
Yuki Mitani often blurs the boundaries between film and stage drama through a strong stage style. Through the cross-border intertextuality of the two art forms of film and stage drama, the audience can easily recognize the label that belongs to Yuki Mitani from many Japanese comedy films.
In the new film "Not in Memory", Mitani joined the location for the first time, and the scenes changed more frequently from the official residence and tavern to the parliament and golf course than in the previous game.
However, he is still interested in the stage scheduling in a single scene, and the photographer Hideo Yamamoto, who once shot in the two one-shot TV movies "Life Festival" and "Big Airport 2013", has once again cooperated with Mitani and continued his previous wonderful performances.
Although consciously "stepping out of the stage", it is still confined to a small theater space.
The first half of "Not In Memory" has a lot of jokes around "adapting to a new identity" and a good teasing of the politicians who are usually high, but it is only a comedy, and can only exude a very naïve political idealism, after all, the real situation is much more complicated.
And a series of farces on the prime minister's wife further disintegrate the original reality of the whole film, making a supposedly sensational ending awkward.
It is said that Fuji Television is actively promoting the introduction of this film to the mainland. I hope that after the epidemic, domestic film fans can also see this exaggerated, interesting and reflective work as soon as possible.
This article was first published in the Adventure Movie: Cinematik
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