Format: Cinema

Release date: 3 October 2008

Venues: Curzon Soho, Ritzy, Picturehouse Greenwich (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: Momentum

Director: Tarsem

Writers: Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, Tarsem

Cast: Catinca Untaru, Justine Waddell, Lee Pace

India/UK/USA 2006

117 mins

Although he made his feature debut with The Cell in 2000, Tarsem has been working as director of commercials and music videos since the mid-90s and this is clearly visible in the lavish credit sequence that opens his second, self-funded effort The Fall. Images of figures jumping heroically from horses and trains in slow motion, wonderfully cinematic as they may be, would also fit perfectly in adverts for Marlboro or Nike. To say that the film focuses on style over substance is not far removed from the truth and even the more emotionally engaging scenes only serve to highlight his undeniable talent as a visual artist.

The Fall (based on the 1981 Bulgarian film Yo Ho Ho) is set in Los Angeles circa 1915, at a time when action-adventure films are beginning to take their grip on Hollywood, bringing with them the ever-increasing dangers of precarious stunts. A victim of such hazards, stuntman Roy Walker is bed-ridden in a hospital, unable to feel his legs and heartbroken after his girlfriend dumped him for a suave film star. Surrounded by hypochondriacs and old-timers with removable dentures, his only relief comes in the form of Alexandria, a young immigrant girl who fell from a tree while picking oranges (excellently played by the young Catinca Untaru, who allegedly spoke no English prior to filming). Finding friendship through shared mischievousness, the pair escape daily banality through the stories that Roy invents for Alexandria, in particular a vivid account of five warriors who set out across a mythical landscape, each with a personal vendetta to settle with a fascist emperor.

As one would expect from a director with such visual flair, the film’s imagery is truly breathtaking. Everything from the vast scenery to the flamboyant costumes is meticulously captured, with sporadic fighting scenes being more akin to choreographed dance than to the video-game-influenced bouts seen so frequently in cinema today. There’s also a fantastic stop-motion animation sequence, which is used to depict the operation Alexandria has to undergo following a fall. Sequences such as this add to the sense of surrealist fantasy as well as to the escapist desires that dominate the film.

However, as engaging as the film’s visual elements may be, the script (co-written by Tarsem with Nico Soultanakis and Dan Gilroy) varies far too much in tone and style to fully engage, veering between emotional indifference and full-on melodrama. Cutting between the fictive and real worlds, the film slowly meanders through its first half, drawing few parallels between the two stories, to the extent that the film feels entirely directionless. It’s only as the pace picks up, following an event revealing Roy’s dark side, that the two worlds begin to blur more satisfyingly and the film manages to create an emotional connection between the two leads. However, the overtly paternal relationship between Roy and Alexandria never quite convinces and when the tears and cries for help come, they just seem unnatural.

Just like The Cell, The Fall succeeds brilliantly on a visual level but falters when it comes to constructing a well-structured plot. This is all the more surprising here as storytelling is of such importance to the narrative. It may well be that the director’s talents are better suited to other mediums.

James Merchant

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 October 2008

Venues: key cities

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Rodrigo Plí¡

Writer: Rodrigo Plí¡, Laura Santullo

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdíº, Daniel Tovar

Mexico 2007

97 mins

While police corruption and the divide between rich and poor might not be original subject material in recent Latin American cinema, Uruguayan-born director Rodrigo Plí¡ has crafted an innovative, compelling addition to the burgeoning genre with his debut feature, La Zona. As the film begins, the roaming camera tracks a white butterfly through a neighbourhood of pristine yards and gorgeous homes, before panning up a menacing barbed-wire fence to reveal the sprawling, dismal slums on the other side of the barrier. This is La Zona, a heavily fortified community in Mexico City that exists virtually outside of the law, thanks to the patronage of a judge who’s granted the wealthy residents privileged status and their own exclusive rights.

When a storm knocks over a billboard and creates a breach in the fence, three young men from the barrio take advantage of the opportunity for a smash and grab, breaking into an elderly woman’s home to rip her off. When she surprises them with a gun, things go tragically wrong, and four people end up dead. The residents of the community, who may lose their special status if there is violence in the compound, soon realise that one of the offenders is still trapped on their side of the fence.

Desperate to keep the police at bay, they collectively decide to hide the violence from the police and to launch a manhunt to find the fugitive themselves. Any voices raised in opposition to the plan are sharply silenced by the majority. Plí¡ intersperses the film with CCTV footage of the fortress community, emphasising its enforced isolation and the siege mentality that consumes its inhabitants. Those who object to the majority’s decisions are prevented from leaving the zone, trapped inside as surely as the intruder who has become the residents’ prey.

That prey is 16-year-old Miguel; young, poor and out of his depth, he doesn’t stand a chance against the bloodthirsty residents and the compromised police. While the police captain is initially determined to investigate the killings in La Zona, his motivation has as much to do with pride and his own dislike of the residents as it does with any notion of justice. Regardless of motivation, however, his determination can do little in the face of widespread corruption and the ingrained belief that the lives of the rich are worth infinitely more than those of the poor.

What’s so disturbing about the film is that it lies within the realm of human possibility. Though the community itself may be exaggerated, it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a society in which the haves live in isolation from the have-nots, with their own laws and social order. The mob mentality that consumes the zone’s residents, who are furious at anyone and anything that threatens their insulated existence, is all too realistic, while neither the poor nor the rich trust the cops to bring anyone to justice. A suspenseful and stomach-churning thriller, La Zona conjures up a bleak but riveting picture of humanity.

Sarah Cronin

Format:Cinema

Release date: 26 September 2008

Venues: Nationwide

Distributor Universal

Director: Paul WS Anderson

Writers: Paul WS Anderson, Robert Thom, Charles B Griffith, Ib Melchior

Cast: Jason Statham, Joan Allen, Ian McShane

USA 2008

89 mins

Inspired by the Roger Corman-produced Death Race 2000 (1975), the new version of Death Race, also produced by Roger Corman, is directed by Paul WS Anderson, a filmmaker whose career has consisted mostly of remakes of projects with pre-existing cult followings (including computer game adaptations such as Resident Evil, and a thematic sequel to Blade Runner called Soldier), which have more often than not disappointed the fans. Stripping away everything from the original Death Race 2000 apart from the character names and basic plot, Anderson’s Death Race is a slick, polished B-movie that technically is a better film than the original, but lacks the shock value, innovation and critical edge of its predecessor.

In fact, Death Race seems to be much more influenced by computer games than by the movie it takes its title from – which should perhaps not be surprising, considering Anderson’s career so far. The action has been relocated to a prison, with inmates racing around an enclosed track that includes the kind of ‘power-ups’ – shields, weapons, death traps, all activated by driving over illuminated circles – that have until now been seen only in games. As the original Death Race had a big influence on computer games such as Carmageddon and Grand Theft Auto, it seems that things have come full circle.

With its reference to the Corman/Bartel original, its video game stylings and its mixing of genres – sci-fi, horror, action – Death Race clearly nods towards cult cinema, yet when the word ‘cult’ is mentioned, Anderson rejects the idea, claiming that ‘when a movie makes close to $200 million worldwide, it’s beyond a cult level’. Unlike the original film, the new version benefited from a massive budget and its attendant publicity machine. However, while Anderson is so keen to distance his film from cult cinema, it is precisely the limited means of many B-movies that allowed filmmakers to take risks and be innovative. Predictably, if depressingly, Anderson’s big budget means he just plays it safe.

Alex Fitch

Read the rest of the feature in our autumn print issue. The theme is cruel games, from sadistic power play in Korean thriller A Bloody Aria to fascist games in German hit The Wave and Stanley Kubrick’s career-long fascination with game-playing. Plus: interview with comic book master Charles Burns about the stunning animated film Fear(s) of the Dark and preview of the Raindance Festival. And don’t miss our fantastic London Film Festival comic strip, which surely is worth the price of the issue alone!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 September 2008

Venues: Curzon Soho, Renoir Cinema (London) and selected key cities

Distributor Artificial Eye

Director: Wong Kar Wai

Based on: Louis Cha’s novel Eagle Shooting Heroes

Cast: Jacky Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau, Tony Leung, Brigitte Lin

Hong Kong/China 2008

93 minutes

After Wong Kar Wai’s ill-advised American venture My Blueberry Nights last year, the re-release of his 1994 Ashes of Time is a welcome reminder of his sheer virtuosity as a filmmaker. Until now, the film was virtually impossible to get hold of, and the director has pieced together a definitive version from negatives scattered across Hong Kong and various Chinatown cinemas. Re-edited and re-scored, the film, set in the world of period martial arts, is a poetic meditation on love and solitude, at once utterly contemporary and firmly rooted in the Buddhist canon.

The film is inspired by Louis Cha’s classic 1950s novel, Eagle Shooting Heroes (also known as Legend of the Condor Heroes), part of a literary tradition that dates back to the Ming Dynasty. Both the novel and the film are striking examples of wuxia – martial arts chivalry, a genre that has become popular in the West thanks to films like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s Hero, which clearly owe a debt to Ashes of Time (the fact that Christopher Doyle was also the cinematographer on Hero makes the comparison all the more striking). But though the film delivers a handful of the requisite action scenes, Wong Kar Wai devotes his energy to exploring the subtle intricacies of human nature, beautifully captured in the film.

Ashes of Time imagines Cha’s protagonists Ouyang Feng and Huang Yaoshi as young men, before they become the infamous Lord of the West and Lord of the East in the novel. The late Leslie Cheung delivers a wonderfully assured performance as Ouyang Feng, a man who lives in virtual isolation on the edge of the Western desert, having fled his home after the woman he loved (played by Maggie Cheung) married his older brother. Now acting as a middleman, he matches clients looking for retribution with swordsmen-for-hire. He becomes ever more aware of his own solitude as his life intersects with those of the damaged people he encounters, including Yaoshi, a good friend now determined to drink his memories away.

The film is built as a triptych that follows the changing seasons, and Wong Kar Wai rejects a traditional narrative structure in favour of beautifully crafted scenes, with tight close-ups of his characters interspersed with evocative desert panoramas. And though the film can be hard to follow (watching the movie after a couple of glasses of red wine is not a great idea), the second time around the somewhat fragmented scenes coalesce into an intense reverie.

Though the temporal and physical setting is strikingly different to Wong Kar Wai’s habitual neon-lit cities, this film unmistakably bears his hallmark: an obsession with love, both unrequited and lost. The respect and devotion he shows to his actors is rewarded by terrific performances, and, as always, his partnership with Christopher Doyle delivers gorgeous, dynamic cinema. The release of Ashes of Time Redux may be debated by purists, but it’s an exciting opportunity to see an example of Wong Kar Wai’s early work on the big screen.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Release date: 12 September 2008

Venue: ICA Cinema(London) and key cities

Distributor: Slingshot Studios

Director: Suroosh Alvi & Eddy Moretti

USA 2007

84 mins

Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi’s powerful yet soft-centred documentary about the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda creates a fascinating portrait of life in Iraq as seen through the eyes of young metal-heads who struggle not merely to survive in a war zone but to practise their music and get a few gigs organised. The film was born out of an article by MTV reporter Gideon Yago, which featured Acrassicauda, published in Vice Magazine shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Alvi, Vice Magazine co-founder, and Moretti, head of Vice Film, stayed in email contact with the band and eventually embarked on a journey to Baghdad in 2006 to find them, wondering if they were still alive. Due to the difficulties and dangers involved in arranging and shooting the interviews, Heavy Metal in Baghdad unfolds in the form of a low-tech, fragmented video diary narrated by Moretti.

The interviews with the band are interspersed with news-like footage of the night bombings and daily routine on the streets during the early days of the war. We get introduced to four of the original five members as they are just about to play a concert in a maximum security hotel block in Baghdad in the summer of 2005. The situation is intense, and the stories they tell are relentlessly bleak, although far less horrifying than those found in other parts of Iraq. Firas, Tony, Marwan and Faisal are a group of frank and immensely likable boys who have grown up with Metallica and Slayer songs, watching Hollywood films to practise their English. Stuck in the middle between the troops and the terrorists, they have learned to deal with their plight, and heavy metal provides them with both solace and a sense of purpose. It is recreation, ritual and cultural expression even if they can’t grow their hair long or indulge in any head-banging for fear of being denounced as Satan-worshippers.

After receiving death threats from rebels and religious fundamentalists, the band decide to leave Baghdad, but reunite in Damascus where they are able to play a small concert in an internet café. Encouraged by the reaction of the meagre audience and the support they receive from Vice, they eventually manage to record three songs in a studio, which revives their dreams of a great career as musicians with hopes to tour around America with their heavy metal heroes, playing to large crowds and growing long hair.

There is a suitable sense of anger coursing through Heavy Metal in Baghdad as the film depicts their lack of freedom and the circumstances that lead to the band becoming refugees, first in Damascus, and currently in Turkey, and the two filmmakers cannot be accused of shrinking away from uncomfortable material. However, the compelling insights and anecdotes conveyed through the interviews are undermined by Moretti’s annoying and repetitive comments on how extremely dangerous and stupid it was of the two filmmakers to go on this risky mission and travel around Baghdad with a group of hired bodyguards. In spite of this small gripe, Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a disturbing and riveting document of Acrassicaudas’s remarkable drive and courage as well as a touching reminder that music can offer a sanctuary to oppressed people.

Pamela Jahn

Format: Cinema

Release date: 19 September 2008

Venue: ICA (London)

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Director: Mamoru Hosoda

Writers: Yasutaka Tsutsui & Satoko Okudera

Original title: Toki o kakeru sh텍jo

Cast: Riisa Naka, Takuya Ishida, Mitsutaka Itakura, Ayami Kakiuchi, Mitsuki Tanimura

Japan 2006

98 mins

From the writer of Paprika comes the finest Japanese animé released in the UK so far this year. A beguiling and affecting mix of lost love, alternate time-lines and near-death experiences, TokiKake (to use its colloquial Japanese title) tells the tale of a high school girl who picks up a device left behind by a time traveller and gets given the power to leap back through time and change history. At first Makoto uses the power for the most frivolous of reasons – revisiting favourite afternoons and even popping back for a particularly nice dinner – but then starts to meddle in the lives and love lives of her classmates.

In the West, one suspects the telling of this kind of story would be fairly twee but Japanese manga and animé aimed at tweenage audiences, particularly female ones, is amongst the most sophisticated. In fact, the definition of sh텍jo (meaning little girl) manga / animé in the US has been appropriated to mean stories that have an appeal to both genders and tends to deal with real-life situations and concerns. Although TokiKake is obviously sci-fi, it deals with its subject matter sensitively and looks at the moral and personal repercussions that such a power to change history might have. As such, it recalls two popular Western time travel tales, the TV series Quantum Leap and the brilliant comedy Groundhog Day. Like QL, it deals with the responsibility a time traveller might have, as changing a single person’s life might affect the lives of others. The void that Makoto travels though – criss-crossed with black stripes representing years and timelines – is also reminiscent of some of the visual tropes of the series. The repetitious aspects of Makoto’s travels and her attempts to make things better also recall Bill Murray’s at first hedonistic and eventually self-improving changes to reality in Groundhog Day.

However, it’s entirely possible that the creators of Quantum Leap and Groundhog Day may have themselves been influenced by the original novel on which TokiKake is based. In Japan, at least, it’s a book that has achieved cult status and has been adapted previously as two live action films, a TV series and a short film in the last 25 years. In fact, the only frustrating aspect of this new version is that it feels like it’s part of a larger story; indeed, this new version is both a remake of and sequel to a previous adaptation. As the story deals with revisiting the same period over and over again it is somewhat apt that each film is connected to the last – the 1997 adaptation is narrated by the actress who played the heroine in the film from 1983 while Makoto’s aunt in this film may very well be the lead character from 97…

This element shouldn’t put off casual viewers though as the subtlety of the animation and elegant layout of many scenes make this a film to be commended for its aesthetics alone, before even considering the intelligent script and engaging characterisation. Like Paprika, it tells the tale of a seemingly normal girl with a fantastic alter ego who is needed to stop a catastrophe (in every sense of the word) from happening and has to put her personal concerns to one side. As you might expect from a time-travel drama, her story is left somewhat open-ended, and while there are already a variety of print and live action prequels, I’d be more than happy to see another instalment to find out what happens next.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Release date: 19 September 2008

Venues: Cineworld Shafts Ave, Vues Islington + Sheperd’s Bush (London) and key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Na Hong-jin

Writers: Hong Won-chan, Lee Shinho, Na Hong-jin

Original title: Chugyeogja

Cast: Kim Yun-seok, Ha Jung-woo, Seo Yeong-hie

South Korea 2008

125 mins

From first-time director Na Hong-jin comes a film that is part Seven, part 24. Joong-ho (Kim Yun-seok) is an ex-cop turned pimp whose call-girls have recently gone missing. He assumes they ran away from the night business until he tracks their bookings back to one client in particular; enter a psychopathic serial killer who keeps the girls in the basement of his house, torturing them calmly till they die – during one gruesome scene, in an intense close-up shot, he takes a hammer and chisel to the head of his latest victim, Mi-jin (Seo Yeong-hie, Shadows in the Palace), who wriggles in distress whilst the hammer blows come down.

Suspense builds after Joong-ho catches the killer and takes him to the police station, only to find himself accused of assault and impersonation of a police officer while the killer is freed. Not only is the chase on again, but Mi-jin is still slowly bleeding to death in the basement, preying on Joong-ho’s conscience. By the time the police realise that they let the real killer go, Joong-ho is already in the field, a few steps ahead of them, working alone, Jack Bauer-style.

Kim Yun-seok gives an excellent performance as the tough pimp who softens up and genuinely takes responsibility, feeling he has a duty of care for his charges. Filmed mostly at night and with many hand-held sequences, The Chaser is a highly polished and accomplished first film for Na Hong-jin. The suspense is taut throughout, and the plot satisfyingly complex.

A massive success in its native South Korea, The Chaser has generated endless discussions on internet forums between those who see it as just a rehashing of late 90s Korean action films and those who can’t stop enthusing about it. To this reviewer this old dog has no new tricks, but it is worth watching if you are a Korean film fan, not simply because it is slick and smart, but also to make your own mind up.

Expect this film to hit our screens twice – Metrodome (the people who brought us Donnie Darko and Assembly) are releasing this title in the UK and Warner Bros have bought the remake rights.

Joey Leung

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venue: ICA, London

Distributor: Manga Entertainment

Directors: Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To

Writers: Sharon Chung, Kenny Kan, Yau Nai Hoi, Au Kin Yee, Yip Tin Shing

Original title: Tie saam gok

Cast: Louis Koo, Simon Yam, Sun Hong Lei, Lam Ka Tung, Kelly Lin

China/Hong Kong 2007

93 mins

When Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To – three heavy-weights of the Hong Kong film industry, who respectively gave us Once Upon a Time in China, City on Fire and Exiled – got together to make a film, it unsurprisingly became one of the most hotly anticipated titles. Triangle was possibly the film that could resurrect Hong Kong’s waning dynamism (output is at a near all-time low, with fewer than 50 films made last year, in comparison to 200 films a year in the 1990s).

Each director made a segment of roughly 30 minutes, and the succession between them is fairly seamless, although the different directing styles will be recognisable to Asian film fans. Tsui Hark sets the stage, Ringo Lam develops the characters further and Johnnie To wraps everything up with his trademark black humour.

The film starts with an atmospheric scene set in a bar, with dim lighting, dark background and bright spotlights on the subjects, as if they were on a stage. Lee Bo Sam (Simon Yam) discusses a bank robbery with Fai (Louis Koo), in a bid to get out of their financial difficulties. The triangle is made complete by their friend Mok (the ever-unassuming Sun Hong Lei), who tries to talk them out of the heist when a mysterious stranger suddenly offers them a chance to get rich quick, dropping an ancient gold coin and a card on the table before leaving. Following the clues left by the stranger, our hapless heroes manage to retrieve a chest buried under the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (pretty much the equivalent of Parliament), in which they find a phenomenally valuable garment made of gold coins.

However, matters are complicated by another triangle, the one formed by Bo Sam, his wife Ling (Kelly Lin) and a cop she is having an affair with, Wen (Lam Ka Tong). Seemingly delusional, Ling claims that she is pregnant and that Bo Sam is trying to kill her. Add to this a further triangle, and you have a fairly convoluted, and at times confusing, plot: Fai is actually an informer for Wen, and he is also trying to run away from the Triads who want to force him to rob a bank (which explains the opening scene, where Fai tries to convince Bo Sam, ex-champion race driver, to be his getaway driver).

The three heroes, the wife, the cop and the Triads, chased by a rookie police officer on a bicycle, all converge in a middle-of-nowhere tin-roofed restaurant, where the final act unfolds under Johnnie To’s light, comedic direction: as the fuse box is repeatedly tripped by various people for various reasons, all the protagonists scrabble in the dark for what they each came for, re-appearing in different gun-pointing configurations when the lights come back on.

Although Triangle is not the film to save the Hong Kong film industry, it is entertaining and in places exhilarating. The seasoned cast is mostly convincing and it is an interesting experiment in collective work. However, it is nothing more than adequate entertainment and will only be important to Asian film connoisseurs as ‘the film directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To’.

Joey Leung

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 August 2008

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho, Odoen Covent Garden (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Shane Meadows

Writer: Paul Fraser

Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Piotr Jagiello, Ireneusz Czop, Elisa Lasowski

UK 2008

75 mins

Somers Town, the latest feature from cult British director Shane Meadows, is the charming story of two 16-year-old boys who find friendship when they fall for the same French waitress.

Tommo (This Is England‘s Thomas Turgoose) is running away from an unhappy life in Nottingham when he finds himself in the Somers Town area of London. However, on his first night, he’s beaten up and his bag is stolen. Marek (Piotr Jagiello) is the son of Polish construction worker Marius (Ireneusz Czop), who is working on the renovations to turn St Pancras station into the new international terminus for Eurostar trains. Marius can’t afford to send Marek to school, so Marek spends his days exploring Somers Town and taking photographs. When Marek meets the bruised and broken Tommo, he decides to hide Tommo in his room and hope his father doesn’t find out. After a bit of light stealing to find Tommo some replacement clothes – Tommo’s idea – Marek introduces Tommo to his muse, the beautiful waitress Maria (Eliza Lasowksi). However, when Maria is called home, the boys hatch a plan to visit her in Paris.

Somers Town has a good script by Paul Fraser and a strong young cast. Meadows combines the two through his preferred working method of improvisation to create naturalistic acting and dialogue, allowing for moments of both comedy and pathos. Similarly, the film is nicely shot in black and white by director of photography Natasha Braier in an attempt to find a visual way of uniting the old and new architecture of Somers Town.

However, these successes are overshadowed by the questions that the plot raises about what it is exactly that Meadows is trying to say with Somers Town. Why are almost all the characters in the movie immigrants, and legal ones at that? Why choose to set the movie around St Pancras International, given that this is where future immigrants will be alighting? Perhaps Meadows wants to offer an alternative vision of England to the white nationalist one he presented in This Is England? Maybe he wants to show an England where legal immigrant workers are essential to the success of a project of national pride like St Pancras International? The disappointing answer to all of these questions is that if Somers Town seems like one big advert for Eurostar, it’s because it is! The film started life at an advertising agency as an idea for a short promotional video, which Eurostar then decided to produce as a full-length movie.

Meadows has always been very open about directing commercials for companies such as McDonald’s as a way of funding his films, which is fine as long as the two things remain separate, but this is a different Filet-O-Fish altogether and feels like deception on the part of Meadows and the movie makers. Meadows is going to have his work cut out defending against the inevitable accusations that he has sold out. Like this one.

Alexander Pashby

For more films by Shane Meadows, see This Is England and This Is Shane Meadows.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 29 August 2008

Venue: ICA (London) and key cities

Distributor ICA Films

Director: Mika Ninagawa

Writers: Moyoco Anno, Yuki Tanada

Based on:the manga by Moyoco Anno

Cast: Anna Tsuchiya, Kippei Shiina, Yoshino Kimura

Japan 2006

111 minutes

Some films are virtually impossible not to like. Mika Ninagawa’s debut feature, Sakuran, based on the manga of the same name by Moyocco Anno, is an exuberant film with an infectious pop sensibility. A well-known fashion photographer, Ninagawa’s experience shines through in the film’s gorgeous visuals and set pieces. Starring Anna Tsuchiya, herself a model and pop-star, Sakuran tells the story of Kiyoha, a young girl sold into prostitution in 18th-century Edo, Japan.

Kiyoha’s feisty character refuses to settle into the narrow confines of Yoshiwara, the nightlife quarter, yearning to escape back into life outside. Her attempts merely result in her repeatedly being caught, beaten and called a ‘filthy, little boiled root’. Her stubborn streak leads to a change of tack – her new goal is not to get away, but to master the art of being an oiran – the highest-ranking prostitute. Though dismayed by the ‘women, women, women… a world of women’, the young Kiyoha’s determination to prove people wrong leads her up the ladder to become one of the brothel’s most valuable assets, stepping on numerous silk-clad toes as she climbs. But her bitchy, riot-girl demeanour conceals a remarkable generosity and tenderness, perfectly captured by Tsuchiya in her terrific performance. Kiyoha refuses to believe that the women are like goldfish – beautiful only within the glass bowl of the brothel, ugly carps in the wild, never giving up on her desire to escape from Yoshiwara on her own terms.

Ninagawa’s film is the perfect antidote to the appalling, Western view of Japanese women propagated by Rob Marshall’s unfortunate Memoirs of a Geisha (which sadly cast two otherwise talented Chinese actresses in the main roles). Anna Tsuchiya’s spirited performance refuses to pander to a male desire for submissive Asian women. And though popular themes in Japanese cinema abound here – the rebellious teen, the star-crossed lovers, the sense of being trapped within the confines of tradition – Ninagawa creates a world that is all hers, a lavish, alternate reality, full of reds and golds, that delights in an almost sensual pleasure, whether it’s the stunning kimonos or the smooth texture of the women’s skin. Most importantly, she creates a world where Kiyoha discovers that she can make her own rules.

Despite its historical setting, the film insists on being contemporary. The soundtrack by Shiina Ringo flows from jazz to pop to heavy rock, continuing the break from tradition. In one scene, Kiyoha, now the brothel’s oiran, performs the traditional promenade to the sounds of drony, heavy guitar; in another, Kiyoha’s passionate lovemaking ends with a burst into a cabaret tune. The eclectic music adds yet another dimension to the film’s playful punk-rock aesthetic.

Cherry blossoms are a national obsession in Japan. Every spring, weather forecasts track the spread of the blossoms across the country, while people throw endless parties beneath the trees, eating and drinking for hours. Named for these blossoms, Sakuran is a beautifully vibrant film, full of colour and light, and simply gorgeous to watch.

Sarah Cronin