2024-03-22 11:48:43
Japanese cinema is currently experiencing fires and landslides. A strange trend only at first glance, because in reality it is of course somewhat hammer-like symbolic of cathartic soul purification and overcoming old constraints, and in any case unmistakable in Hayao Miyazaki’s recently Oscar-winning “The Boy and the Heron” as well as now in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “The Innocence”.
In the Studio Ghibli animated film, the boy in the title loses his mother to the American bombing of a Tokyo hospital at the beginning. The animated sparks flew around his inconsolability. Soon a collapsing tunnel in an old tower leads him to another world.
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In the live-action film “Innocence,” another boy named Minato watches a fire on the other side of the city from a high-rise balcony. What goes up in flames is, as it later turns out, a strip club, a symbol of frowned upon sexuality. And in the end, a typhoon buries an old train carriage under masses of mud. But the trap turns out to be a way out, a promise and salvation in a hostile world.
Kore-eda is famous for his warm-hearted outsider portraits. In “Shoplifters – Family Ties” (2018) and “Broker” (2022), which was shot in Korea, children play a central role; They encourage pity, give hope and thus get the plot rolling.
And something else is peculiar to them. The writer Robert Musil once put it well when he said that he only set his “Confusions of the Pupil Törless” in the youth environment because the social roles there were not yet cemented. Good and evil shimmer in a more intricate way than among adults – today I’m the crook and you’re the detective, tomorrow, in another game, it’s the other way around.
A tender rebellion
Although “Innocence” takes place a few thousand kilometers and 100 years away from Musil’s Austro-Hungarian world, it is based on the same insight, except that the film constantly works to expand this releasing grace until it is but extends to the realm of adults, which in Japan is imagined to be particularly ossified and immobile. If that’s a cliché, it’s one that the film rigidly asserts as reality and then rebels against in tender rebellion.
For example, there is Minato’s mother Saori (played with brilliant restraint by Shoplifters star Sakura Ando). After the death of her husband, she lives a modest life as a single mother, which only begins to change when she decides to take action against a brutal teacher who apparently beats and humiliates her child. Once Minato bleeds from his ear, then he cries because the teacher called him “pig brains.”
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At school, Saori encounters a wall of silence. In an impressive scene, she sees herself crushed by the collective teaching staff as half the staff gathers around her in an apologetic gesture, without drawing the slightest consequence from the harsh accusations. As a viewer, you become an accomplice to Saori’s outrage – only to gradually realize that everything is completely different.
The headmistress’s (Yûko Tanaka) heart isn’t made of stone at all. She has experienced a great loss herself and has armored herself under an unforgivable guilt. And the teacher, Mr. Hori (Eita Nagayama), turns out to be the opposite of the cold-hearted psychopath that the first third of “Innocence” portrays him as.
What just happened?
Immediately after its premiere last spring at Cannes, where it won the award for best screenplay (by Yūji Sakamoto), the film was compared to Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” (1950). There, too, cleansing forces of nature descend on a humanity that only ever believes itself to be in temporary possession of a truth, until in the end everything dissolves into multi-perspectivity like a raindrop hitting the earth.
There is some truth to the comparison, although it is flawed in one crucial point: Kore-eda does have various chapters that show the events in a new light, but ultimately there is only one truth. It just needs to be stripped gradually like the blossom of one of those flowers whose name Minato knows.
The girls give a boy who loves flowers the cold shoulder, his mother warns him. Is it such expectations, such psychosocial pressure, that explains Minato’s strange behavior, the suddenly missing sneaker, the nightly trips into an empty tunnel in the nearby mountain, even his suicide attempt when he throws himself out of a moving car? He was still the good model son! What just happened?
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His classmate Yori (Hinata Hiiragi) plays an obviously important role in all of this, and in the second act, when the film switches to the teacher’s perspective, it looks as if Minato is bullying him with sadistic relish. Yori is a nonconformist little angel who apologizes to his father for not being able to conform to the usual role expectations of brawling boys and is clearly at peace with his blossoming sexuality.
In the third act there is finally the resolution, which essentially proves Mr. Hori right, who once says: “These days it is the parents who cause many more problems than the children; These are the real monsters.” Monsters are always the others – that’s what this beautiful, human film teaches, which also runs with the structural precision of a Christopher Nolan clockwork – until we get close to them.
#Innocence #cinema #monsters