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.
Tonight, let's talk about the story behind the massacre of a family of three.
The movie "Fool's Tale" attracted a lot of attention when it was released in Japan in the first half of this year. The film not only brings together a number of young actors with great image and strength, including Satoshi Mu and Hikaru Manjima, but it also becomes the only Japanese feature film to be shortlisted for the horizon section of the 73rd Venice International Film Festival.
The film, adapted from the novel of the same name and a Naoki Prize-winning alternate novel, revolves around two tragedies. Photon (played by Hikari Manjima), who appears at the beginning of the film, is imprisoned for allegedly abusing his own child. But instead of immediately confessing her motives for committing the crime and whether it was really a crime, the director immediately turned the story to another incident that occurred a year ago in Tokyo's Setagaya district, from the perspective of his brother Takeshi Tanaka (played by his wife Satoshi Mu), who came to visit Mitsuko.
Although ordinary citizens have forgotten about the tragedy that was a sensation at the time, Tanaka, a weekly reporter, seems to have an extra passion for it. Under his arguments, the magazine's editor reluctantly agreed to his return visit to the case on the occasion of his anniversary.
Hikari Manjima plays Photon
In Tanaka's interviews with relatives and friends around the victim's couple, the flaws hidden behind the seemingly perfect family are gradually revealed.
On the surface, her husband, Tian Xianghaoshu, is an elite office worker who has graduated from a famous school and worked in a famous enterprise. His colleagues praised him, and his superiors trusted him.
But his college classmates, especially female classmates, revealed that he was once a scumbag who played with the feelings of several women (and if we look back at the details of the story, we can also find that he was not honest after marriage).
On the other hand, his wife Ji Hui is a good wife and mother with both talents and good looks. She also graduated from Mingmen University, assisted her husband, raised her daughter, and kept the family in good order.
But her college classmate Junko first accused Yu Jihui of seducing her then-boyfriend in an interview, and then exposed the more shameful truth that she "offered" girls to the elite circles of the university.
In the unfolding of these black histories, the secrets of photons have also been revealed. Her twisted relationship with her brother and parents is the final chapter of this record of human ignorance.
Objectively speaking, "Fool's Tale" is a film of high quality. The film not only faithfully restores the content and form of the original work, but the newly added parts – such as the scene of giving way on the bus in the opening and closing scenes of the opening and closing credits proposed by Satoshi Mu himself – make the structure of the story and the image of the characters more complete. The film's exposure to the reality of inequality in Japan is also very spicy.
Satoshi Mu, his wife, plays Tanaka
The society in the film, like japanese society, is strictly divided into two parts: the upper and lower levels.
The two men and women in the story, Mr. and Mrs. Tian Xiang and Tanaka Brothers and Sisters, are essentially people of the lower society. But the difference between them is that the Tian Xiang family has achieved upward mobility through their own "efforts".
The reason why husbands remain ambiguous with many girls is actually to facilitate employment by taking advantage of their family background, and the reason why wives constantly push girls into the tiger's mouth is only to cover up their flawed origins and maintain their status in the small circle.
You can condemn their unscrupulousness, but don't forget to condemn the society itself that is forcing them to do so. And their deaths declared that they, and many others like them, could not escape the "fate" assigned by Japanese society itself.
On the other hand, after watching the movie, I always had a feeling of discomfort that I couldn't get rid of.
This aftertaste does not come from the ending setting adopted by the film that does not explain everything clearly, but from the suspicion that both the original and the film are "too strong". This seems to be a common problem in recent years, which has been called "イヤミス" (which is a combination of the Japanese words "hate" and "reasoning", let alone "aversion") by some Japanese readers, like the original book of Yu Xinglu.
Although all reasoning can be said to create reading pleasure above the misfortunes of others, "disgust" is like hanging a sheep's head and selling dog meat, in the name of socialism, but putting all the emphasis on the topicality of the case. What the author wants to tell is that Japan is literally reproducing the class itself under the illusion that "100 million people are middle class", but it does not tell the story of the photons that could have been more brilliant, thus creating some imbalance in the narrative structure.
Although YuYuki was shortlisted for the Naoki Prize, it scored the lowest of all the works that year. Junichi Watanabe, one of the judges, even directly said such harsh things as "I don't know why this work was nominated".
As several judges' comments on the original book suggest, the story's approach of extracting the truth by depicting "group portraits" of people involved in the event does not seem necessary.
In fact, the group portrait style of "crowd noise" has long been seen in Japanese movies. As far away as Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" is close to Yoshihiro Nakamura's "Snow White Murders". But the reason why these two are brilliant is that the narrators and events in the film are in the same time and space, and they stand on their own different narratives, questioning the "truth" from the ontological level.
In "The Book of Fools", the story told by the "others" is at best the background of the entire case, and the logic behind it is still that as long as we can find the truth of the case according to Tu Suoji, it is undoubtedly inferior in terms of intention.