Shuichi Okita, 40 years old.
Last week, I accidentally met Director Okita at a family sake brewery in Tokyo, conveying to him the familiarity and love of Chinese film fans for his work. His recognition and recognition among Chinese audiences is far higher than he knows. Talking about this year's Shanghai International Film Festival, the attention of Japanese films is so high, he is too modest, laughing and saying, "The big scenes in Shanghai are all celebrities." ”
Directed by Shuichi Okita
Even in Japan, Shuichi Okita's films are still a niche, but I believe that many Chinese film fans, like me, have long regarded him as a representative of a new generation of Japanese directors; his new work "Where There is Shoichi Kumagaya" is one of the most anticipated Japanese films in 2018.
"Where There is Shoichi Kumagai"
I met Shuichi Okita from his commercial film debut, Antarctic Cooker. A group of men placed in the icy snow of Antarctica, cooking became the only cure. Watch Masato Sakai kneading rice balls, making ramen, and frying crabs, the camera takes care of the finger movements extremely finely, which is particularly attractive. In this film, Shuichi Okita has demonstrated his ability to combine personal interest with commercial appreciation.
"Antarctic Chef"
Woodpecker and Rain was seen at the 2012 Beijing Japan Film Week. The film has both a main line that explores the relationship between father and son, and a zombie film-within-a-play with a fan shadow color. Continuing the light humor of "Antarctic Cooker", the rhythm of "Woodpecker and Rain" is even less hurried.
Woodpecker and Rain
In the movie, the film crew of the play-in-play is thrown into a small mountain village, and a collision between urban people and the countryside is naturally born. In fact, works six years later are also sprouting here. Gifu Prefecture, the location of "Woodpeckers and Rain", is the hometown of the painter Shoichi Kumagaya. With the crew (Yamazaki Nu is also among them) passing by the kanban board of the "Kumagaya Shouichi Memorial Hall" many times, Okita Shuichi was curious, and finally walked into the art museum one day to visit, learned the story of the famous painter who lived to the age of 97 and had not taken half a step in his backyard for 30 years, and saw the photographer Fujimori Mori's photo album "Solo Music: The World of Shoichi Kumagai", which was based on the painter's later days, and wrote the first draft of the script.
The square inches of heaven and earth, the self-small universe, seems to have always been the worldview that Okita Shuichi fell in love with. He prefers small scenes, the initial short story "Pot and Friends" (2002) is a chamber of secrets drama, the protagonist of "This Wonderful World" (2006) is a teenager who can't get out of the door, and the Antarctic of "Antarctic Chef" (2009) can also be seen as an enclosed space.
"Seinosuke Yokomichi"
After the acclaimed "Seinosuke Yokomichi" (2013, the original novel author Shuichi Yoshida), Okita chose to return to the original script and made "To See the Waterfall" (2014), a film strung together by the small talk of an aunt's mountaineering group.
When making movies, the deep motivation is usually to satisfy the desire for expression, but director Shuichi Okita repeatedly tells his "hidden heart". "Mohican Returns Home" is an old-fashioned story about Tokyo and his hometown town, rock youth and conservative father, the theme is the same as "Woodpecker and Rain", and it is also a theme that can easily resonate with the whole world. At the Shanghai Film Festival's Great Bright Cinema in the summer of 2016, Ryuhei Matsuda, who kept a Mohican head, won the laughter of a thousand spectators.
When he first drafted the script for Shoichi Kumagai, Shuichi Okita was not yet 35 years old. Probably like us, I was curious about the painter who lived in seclusion for thirty years without leaving home, who won the Medal of Honor for Japanese Culture but refused to accept the award.
"The Sea" (composed in 1950 and 1947, respectively, in the Kumagaya Shoichi Museum) Photo: 2018 Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art Kumagai Shouichi exhibition
In the painter's later works, the picture is becoming more and more simple, which is diametrically opposed to the young age. The film starts with a comment from Emperor Showa "How old is this?" The opening, followed by one interloper after another, leads to a hilarious plot. The two main actors, 82-year-old Yamazaki Nu and 75-year-old Kiki Shirin, present an innocence without carving.
(Left) "The Day Yang Died" (1928, painted after the death of his second son, Yō kumagaya), (right) "Haruka and Lily" (1926) Photo: Shoichi Kumagai, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2018
Watching "Where Shoichi Kumagai is" at Ginza CINE SWITCH, the audience is almost all white-haired people. In the opening dinner table scene, the old painter crushes the sausage with pliers, causing a burst of laughter of "I know I know". For aging, there is no sad lament in the movie, but a humorous mockery. Three of the five children between Shoichi Kumagaya and his wife Hideko, three of whom left first. The painter who has experienced three times the white-haired man sending the black-haired man has not put "too long to live" on his lips, and when he is over 90 years old, he still says in an interview with the Nikkei News that "in the world, I like too many things."
"Where There Is Shoichi Kumagai" unfolds almost entirely in old wooden houses and courtyards. The backyard is the whole universe — spending thirty years gazing at ants and leaves in the backyard, the richness and blandness of life, the so-called "meaning" of life, all changed under the scrutiny of the temporal dimension. At best, we can look at the painter's back like the photographer in the film, Takeshi Fujimori (Ryo Kase) and his assistant, imitating him, but it is still difficult to tell whether the ant steps on the left leg or the right leg first.
Shuichi Okita said in an interview that spending a month shooting in the courtyard will naturally notice that "the branches of the trees have become longer today." The emergence of this sense is probably close to the world of elderly painters. "For example, how many holes are there in the microphone that is being used for the interview?" Counting how many there are, it's enough to be happy, and now I can already experience such fun. ”