Kourei (Séance)

Some time ago I have reviewed Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Shokuzai. While writing the article I have realized, much to my surprise, that I have yet to see any of the director's movies. Since then, I was looking for a chance to see one of his movies. And it's hard to find a better occasion to watch a ghost movie than Halloween evening.

Junko (Fubuki Jun) is living a modest, monotonous live in a countryside with her husband, a sound engineer (Yakusho Koji). You'd think nothing out of ordinary, apart from the fact that she is a spiritual medium. She can see ghosts, communicate with the dead or gain information about people and events by touching their belongings. This is as much a gift as a curse to her - while she can help people who consult her, she's unable to hold a regular job due to her extrasensory perception kicking in at the wrong moment - as depicted in the scene when she takes up a part-time job at a family restaurant. Moreover, she broods over the fact that - due to her abilities being in the most part involuntary and hard to control - she can't prove them and is looked upon suspiciously by others. An unexpected chance arrives when a psychology student she was in contact with invites her to join an ongoing police investigation. A girl has been kidnapped. An accident has put the supposed kidnapper into coma and the trail runs cold. The police is skeptical, but will follow any clue if it can bring them to the kidnapped girl. Junko sees this as a chance to prove her abilities to the world and turn around her mundane live. A handkerchief the police passes her allows her to trace the girl's whereabouts. Much to her surprise, the girl turns up unconscious and malnourished in a trunk her husband takes with him when he goes out in the wild on recording sessions. Instead of handing the girl over to the police at the spot and likely making her husband a prime suspect, Junko concocts a plan that will put her in the spotlight as a spiritualist that has solved the case for the police. The events take the turn for the worse when the girl they now hold in custody dies and begins to haunt them...

Kourei is a 2000 TV movie loosely based on Séance on a Wet Afternoon, British film from 1964 starring Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough. Either that, or they share the common source material - novel by Mark McShane. While they do share the outline of the story, the differences are fundamental and run deep, if the article on the book that I base this opinion on is correct.

In the novel, Myra - Junko's novel counterpart - is the one who kidnaps the child in the first place. She wants to establish herself as a first-class spiritualist. She's also the breadwinner of the family, as the séances she holds are the main income of the family. The husband Bill is unemployed and passive, unable and afraid to talk his wife out of her plan. Myra's motivation is her ambition, Junko however, while also seeking recognition, is dragged into the case more or less by chance and large part of the reason for tricking the police is her desire to put her husband out of suspicion. Myra is also a fraud, while in Junko's case we are led to believe she is the real thing. It also seems as if Yakusho's character had more backbone than Bill, though I don't know how Bill's character develops with the story, so I might be wrong here.

Much like in Shokuzai, the music is minimal, mostly ambient and used in the scenes depicting the supernatural. The exception again is a track played on bagpipes, much like in the 3rd episode of Shokuzai, used in one particularly unsettling scene.

The film's cast features several other well known faces - Kusanagi Tsuyoshi as the psychology student, Ittoku Kishibe as his professor, Kitaro as the police detective and Osugi Ren in a small role as a restaurant customer.

The pacing is slow and much of the film's value is conveyed through the mood and atmosphere, between the lines. Also, don't count on the movie to scare you senseless - it was a plus for me, as I'm not a horror person, but taking this movie for a token asian horror in lieu of Ringu, Dark Water or Ju-on might leave you disappointed.

My point for this movie

The scary scenes are nice and all, but the real strength of this movie lies in the depiction of the relationship between the wife and the husband. They seem distant from each other, much like any other stereotypical Japanese marriage. But the same can be said about them being distant from the rest of the world, the wife due to her abilities, the husband due to his aloof personality and solitary nature of his work. Perhaps it's this quality that brings them together. Before the incident, we see them together eating dinner, engaged in small talk about the husband's work. We see the husband coming home after work while the wife is holding a séance for a customer, we see him lying down and breathing out a cloud of fog when she's conducting the ritual. Yet they do not talk about it later, nor do they speak anything about her powers until they find the girl. I assumed he might not know about them, and even if he does, it will somehow cause a rift between them. It doesn't happen. It seems he accepted her, knowing about them all along, and will go to great lengths in order to protect her.

What's your favourite Kurosawa Kiyoshi movie? What would you recommend next? Cure? Charisma? Or maybe something entirely different?

Shokuzai

A primary school girl, Adachi Emiri, is raped and murdered. Four of her friends, who were playing with her on the schoolyard that day, saw the murderer face-to-face, yet cannot do anything to identify him. Emiri's mother, Asako, invites the girls to a birthday party held in Emiri's memory. Sitting opposite them at the table, she confronts them with the following words:

"I won't forgive any of you. Find the murderer no matter what it takes. Otherwise, atone in ways that will satisfy me. I’ll never forget about you until that is done. You won't escape from the atonement."

Fifteen years later there are still no hints to the identity of the criminal. The case ran cold, yet the memories of the incident haunt the four survivors, their lives bent and twisted around these curse-like words.

Shokuzai is a story of vengeance and atonement, directed by acclaimed director Kurosawa Kiyoshi and based on a novel by Minato Kanae, the author of Kokuhaku and the currently airing Koukou Nyushi. The five episode mini-series was produced by WOWOW, a broadcaster with a reputation for the dark, grim and gritty, and they prove this reputation is well deserved. The first four episodes follow the stories of each of the surviving girls, connected only by the past that left them scarred, and the person of Asako (Koizumi Kyoko), always in black, appearing before them like a wraith.

In the first episode, Aoi Yuu plays a beautician with a distrust towards men, who finds herself in an emotionally abusive relationship. Second episode shows a story of a strict teacher (Koike Eiko), who rises and falls as a local hero after an incident in which she violently deals with an assailant on the school grounds. Ando Sakura stars in the third episode as a social recluse, who grows suspicious of her idolized brother's (an rare unsympathetic Kase Ryo) relationship with his own stepdaughter. In the fourth episode Ikewaki Chizuru plays a florist getting back at her sister after years of being sidetracked and taken advantage of. Will any of them break free from the past and Asako's curse? Or is there a chance the murderer will be caught, however slim it may be? The fifth, final episode will show. Or will it?

In terms of realization, the series is excellent. Tension is achieved with minimal means, music is non-existent for the most part or reduced to ambient, with one notable exception being the bagpipes in Ando Sakura's episode. The visuals are typical for a WOWOW show - sharp, cold and realistic. I particularly liked the use of flashbacks in each episode. They showcase different aspects of the day of the murder, that's for sure, but they also play a more subtle role. By continuously, almost nauseously, repeating certain scenes, like the scene where the girls meet the murderer or the quoted scene at the birthday party, the viewer himself feels as if he was constantly reliving the past the same way the characters do.

It's not an easy watch, yet it's certainly worthwhile. With so many dramas being simply a pleasant way to pass the time, it's good to have series like Shokuzai and broadcasters like WOWOW, consistently going against the flow.

My point for this show

You don't often see movie directors of this calibre getting into dramas, but when you do, you're in for a treat. Koreeda Hirokazu is the man behind currently airing Going My Home - we'll see how it will proceed, but the first episode was solid. SABU made Troubleman, a puzzlebox of a series that deserves more attention than it's getting. You also don't often see TV series on Venice Film Festival, which was the case with Shokuzai, either.