Editor's Note: If you "don't want to sleep" or "can't sleep," read on.
There may be a literary film here, and there may be a horror film here. I don't know if you'll fall asleep or if you'll be scared even more out of bed.
A murder case, three suspects, string together three stories about love and trust. This article contains spoilers and should be read with caution.
Three frustrated people in Heaven Out of Character.
In the 2005 film "Paradise Out of Place" directed by Lee Sang-il, two men and one woman and three young people who are frustrated in life are connected by a bus hijacking incident, and it is difficult to take revenge on society.
In his new film "Fury", the three men who live in three places but also have "Loser" written on their faces are suspected by the audience of being the real fierce mountain gods who sensationalized Japan's "Eight Princes Murder Incident" a year ago because they lived in a fog.
Poster of Fury
The detailed coverage of the facelift of the mountain god in the news program has forced the three "face-bumping" men to cross the difference in sexual orientation and force them to re-enter the past that they do not want to look back on. Compared with the audience's innocuous guessing and guessing, the re-examination of all kinds of people around them, especially their loved ones or friends, is directly related to the survival of the three people.
Tokyo's high-ranking white-collar yuma (Satoshi Mufu) believes that Naoto (Tsuyoshi Ayano), who was picked up by him from a gay party, must be the real murderer, and with a look of fear, he tries to erase all the traces of trust that the two have built up day and night, completely losing Naoto.
Chiba's bad girl Aiko (Aoi Miyazaki) sees Tetsuya (Kenichi Matsuyama), who works for the fishing association where her father Yohei (Ken Watanabe) is, as a symbol of peace of mind, but because she is not sure if he is hiding another face, she almost becomes a passerby with him.
The most extreme behavior occurs in Okinawa's unworldly teenager Tatsuya (Sakumoto Takashi). Like his family, he trusts Shingo (Mirai Moriyama), who once lived alone on an uninhabited island, and even once regarded Shingo as a solid backing. When it is discovered that everything is a hoax, he and Izumi (Hirose Suzu) are just Shingo's "playthings", and he destroys the idol with his own hands.
Cover of Shuichi Yoshida's novel Fury
Compared with Shuichi Yoshida's original work, the film has a nearly 180-degree flip of yuma, Izumi and other characters.
The book reveals many times that Yuma seems to be indifferent to his homosexual identity, but in fact he is quite scrupulous. He referred to Naoto as "Kanaya Hideyoshi" out of fear that he would be embarrassed if he took Naoto to meet his relatives and friends. Receiving a phone call from the police who falsely claimed not to know Naoto, he considered that the relationship might affect or even destroy his brother's career.
But in the film, Yuma's family consists only of his mother lying in a hospital bed. And although he, as written in the book, after several hesitations and taking Naoto into the ward, was also fragmented when he told why he did not allow Naoto to attend his mother's funeral, psychologically he did not have a fierce struggle beyond himself.
On the contrary, Yoshida Shuichi's gentle treatment of Izumi was torn off by Lee Sang-il. The novel downplays the attempted rape of the Fountain by American soldiers, but the film details the process of their successful venting of animalism and arranges for a mother and daughter upstairs of nearby residents to watch indifferently.
Lee Sang-il's behavior is obviously related to the fact that American soldiers stationed in Okinawa often commit crimes against Japanese women, and the people have long been accustomed to and even numb. His 2004 film about the Japanese student movement, "69," has revealed the extremely ambiguous attitude of ordinary Japanese to American soldiers.
Poster for the movie "69"
Only the line between Aiko and Tetsuya, the film has achieved a more faithful restoration.
The biggest dissatisfaction of the original party with the film is that when Lee Sang-il and Shuichi Yoshida adapted it, they added too much personal selfishness, weakened the function of the novelist, and led to too much emotion and lack of details. They prefer to believe that if the collaboration between the two is like the creation of the script for the movie "Wicked", with Shuichi Yoshida dominating, the film will show the essence of the original work like "Wicked".
Poster for the movie Wicked Man
However, it is undeniable that just as "Paradise Disqualification" uses the process of "self-destruction" of young people in three different occupations to describe the ordinary survival dilemma of Young People in Japan, the three parallel stories in the movie "Fury" outline the current situation of "love and trust" in Japanese society.
Poster for the movie "Disqualified Paradise"
Compared with many Japanese films that deconstruct the family and question its meaning, the families of Aiko, Yuma, Tatsuya, and Izumi in Fury are not all complete, but their relationship with their families is touching.
Aiko's misdeeds at the custom shop makes Yohei extremely remorseful and distressed, and he investigates Tetsuya's identity after Aiko falls in love, out of fear that his daughter will meet someone again.
Why Yuma did not get married, the mother knew that she never asked, and she expressed her blessing to her son with the pleasure of getting along with Naoto.
Izumi's mother once fell into the wind and dust, and the mother and daughter moved to Okinawa to live a peaceful life of mutual support.
Tatsuya's family can be described by the word "model".
However, Tetsuya, Naoto, and Shingo, who formed a brief relationship with them as lovers or friends, could only watch the happiness of other people's homes.
Tetsuya is unable to repay the debts left behind by his parents' suicide, and in order to avoid the pursuit of the underworld, he can only hide in unnoticed corners and live.
Naoto's "home" from childhood to adulthood is only a welfare home, and the only "relative" is the "sister" who grew up together in the "family".
Shingo is like a ghost with no connection to the world, and due to his lack of skills, he has encountered many injustices on his way to job hunting.
Such two types of people talk about love and friendship, and it is natural that "trust" has become a luxury.
For Naoto, the kindness given by Yuma's mother is a kind of family compensation, and it is also the biggest external motivation for him to be determined to stay with Yuma. But for Yuma, Naoto's taciturnity may contain ulterior secrets.
When he learned on the phone on the street of Ginza that several of his friends had been robbed, he caught a glimpse of Naoto talking with a woman in a café and returned home to ask Naoto about it. He did not directly say that he was confused, but first asked where Naoto went, seeing that Naoto's answer did not match what he saw, he diverged from the topic and asked Naoto in a seemingly concerned tone when he would go to find a job, whether the money was enough, and Naoto let him not worry.
Yuma sees Naoto dating a woman and has a distrustful conversation with him.
In the air of embarrassment and silence, Yuma finally says that he actually saw Naoto dating women, saying that it doesn't matter whether Naoto is bisexual or not, the key is that he suspects that Naoto has betrayed him more completely. Regardless of the interpretation given by the straight man, he reserves the right of final judgment.
What happened to a friend clearly affected Yuma. Before he saw the photo of Yamajin after plastic surgery in the news screen, he had doubts about Naoto's character.
On Tetsuya's side, Aiko's simplicity and enthusiasm make him understand that he still has the ability to love and be loved, but Yohei is not optimistic about the relationship between the two, and also makes Tetsuya think about how far he and Aiko can go. Aiko's psychological struggle after reading the news shows how hard it is to believe in a person with all her heart.
Shingo is more extreme. He first tearfully deceives Tatsuya, saying that he also feels deep remorse for Izumi's rape by American soldiers and his inability to do anything at the time, and then smashes the homestay run by Tatsuya's parents into a mess. When Tatsuya finds the uninhabited island, Shingo tells him how eager he is to see Izumi being brutally ravaged by American soldiers.
In the final analysis, Shingo, who has "antisocial personality disorder", does not believe that "there is truth in the world, there is true love in the world", and his name and his words and deeds constitute irony.
From this perspective, Lee Sang-il is much more "ruthless" than Shuichi Yoshida. In the original work, Shingo and Tatsuya did not see Izumi being invaded by American soldiers.
And Lee Sang-il's more brutal way of telling the story of these three constantly changing positions on the "trust and doubt" line is to use various dislocations of sound painting.
It is similar to the sound and painting dislocation of the story with the music strings of the Oriental Gods, which can be seen everywhere in the film.
Shortly after the opening scene, Yohei brings Aiko home from the custom shop on the Shinkansen, and the music of the Oriental Gods temporarily eliminates the gap between father and daughter, and also explains Yuma's indulgence and loneliness in the gay voice and color place.
When Yuma talks to Naoto about the mysterious woman, Aiko's question to Yohei in the latter scene, "Do you believe me?", also brings out Naoto's voice. However, he did not tell Yuma that he was a straight man of his "sister", nor did he ask this sentence.
Yuma also did not say no answer, in exchange for his voice in the street crying. Yuma, who is separated from Naoto's yin and yang who died suddenly of a heart attack, learns that the real murderer has been assassinated by Tatsuya, and cannot let go of the past, and asks Naoto's date to talk to each other, knowing the relationship between the two, and how much Naoto loves and trusts him.
Poster of the movie "Lan Yu"
But what is the use of howling to vent remorse? Just like the end of "Lan Yu", Chen Handong drives around the streets of Beijing again, and it is impossible to receive a "Happy New Year" greeting from Lan Yu again.
At the same time, Izumi and Aiko are also sad in a sad place that cannot bear to look back. The tears on his face were also full of regret.
Three crying faces in Fury
Happily, Aiko eventually saved Tetsuya with her actions. And the picture of her and Tetsu sitting next to each other on the train echoes her and Yohei sitting opposite each other on the Shinkansen, both times home, both times redemption, passive with their father, and active with their lover. She removes the small flower on her head, representing her determination to live an ordinary life with Tetsuya.
Aiko's two returns home.
The impact of Shingo's writing on the door with the blood of the deceased and the stone carved on the wall during his stay on the uninhabited island will naturally fade away with time to the audience and the impact of Tatsuya and Izumi– I hope that everyone who comes from "Fury" will recall the past, and what rings in their minds is only the note written by Ryuichi Sakamoto for the film.
Shingo (mountain god) wrote "anger".