Kaibatsu
Hirokazu Kore-eda (2023)
Hirokazu Kore-eda treats his characters kindly. That made his last film, Broker (2022) – like his television series, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (2023) – often charming but finally bland. With Monster, Kore-eda, although never unkind, almost over-compensates. For anyone who, like me, found Broker too gently humane for its subject matter, much of this new film is bracingly different – and grim.
The last of the ten films I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, Monster begins with an urban fire, the flames in the night sky eclipsing the street lights below. The conflagration is watched by ten-year-old Minato Mugino (Soya Kurokawa) and his widowed mother Saori (Sakura Ando) from the balcony of their flat, on a high floor of a nearby apartment block. The fire, which begins in a ‘hostess club’, destroys the building of which the club is part. How and where the blaze started are the talk of the neighbourhood next morning. There’s disapproving mention of a local schoolteacher who patronised the club. His name is Michitoshi Hori and Saori’s son is one of his pupils. Soon afterwards, Minato is clearly troubled by something that happened at school: his mother prises out of him that Mr Hori said Minato’s brain had been ‘switched with a pig’s brain’ and had struck him. Saori promptly turns up at the office of the school principal, Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka), to demand an explanation. Although she immediately arranges a meeting with Hori (Eita Nagayama) and other staff, Mrs Fushimi insists on speaking in formal platitudes that explain nothing and madden Saori all the more. The principal’s male colleagues seem to take a cue from their boss until Hori, feeling the pressure of the situation, blurts out that Minato has been bullying another boy in his class,
Kore-eda himself is more informative: we soon learn, for example, that Mrs Fushimi has only recently returned to work following the death, in shocking circumstances, of the grandson whose photograph is on her office desk. It’s uncertain what has happened to Minato in the typhoon that ends the first part of Monster but once Kore-eda returns to the blaze in the hostess club and starts showing the fire, then other incidents already featured, from a different point of view – Mr Hori’s – we twig what the film’s overall shape is going to be. Re-setting and re-telling a story in this way isn’t typical of Kore-eda and Monster is the first film he has made working with a script that he hasn’t written. The screenplay is credited to Yuji Sakamoto alone but a narrative structure that shows how different individual perspectives make for varying interpretations of the same events, can hardly fail to evoke another famous Japanese screen drama, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Each of Monster’s three ‘acts’ begins with the fire and climaxes in the typhoon though the third act also describes the storm’s aftermath. The longer the film goes on (it runs a few minutes over two hours), the more Kore-eda’s characteristic human sympathy registers in the narrative. But not his usual clear storytelling: although Monster’s main concerns emerge clearly enough, I didn’t know what to make of its conclusion.
The film’s last third, although it also reveals Mrs Fushimi’s unhappy secret, focuses chiefly on the relationship of Minato and Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), the slight, gently eccentric classmate he’s alleged to have bullied. Other boys make fun of Yori because he’s fey and rather feminine. He and Minato are friends but the latter is increasingly anxious and touchy both about what the friendship signifies and what it may lead others to think of Minato himself. (A similar theme propelled Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022).) At the end of the second part of Monster, while the typhoon is still raging, Hori joins forces with Saori, who’s desperate to find her son; they struggle through an area of wilderness to the abandoned railway carriage that is Minato’s and Yori’s secret hiding place. The carriage has been overturned by the storm; Hori manages to force open a door and, after peering inside, gives Saori a look that is deliberately tantalising: we can’t be sure whether or not what he has seen confirms her worst fears. In the last part of the film, however, we see Minato and Yori emerge unscathed from the carriage in the benign, sunlit morning after the typhoon, into green meadows beyond the wilderness. I didn’t get if this was meant to indicate what had actually happened or that the children had died and been reunited in some kind of paradise – stupidly vague as that sounds and hard as it is to believe from a film-maker as imaginative about the next world as Kore-eda showed himself to be in After Life (1998). Neither alternative satisfies.
Even so, Monster mostly feels like a return to form for Kore-eda. While the narrative structure might seem excessively complicated, the delaying and drip-feed of revelations are less mechanical than is often the case because lying and obfuscation are essential to the texture. Kore-eda explores in different ways what it means to be a ‘monster’ or to do monstrous things. (The title also links to a game that Minato and Yori play – that game where the name of someone or something is written on a post-it stuck to your forehead and you have to ask questions to try and work out your identity. It seems in Japan this game is called ‘Who’s the Monster’?) The film is dedicated to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who wrote the score and who died earlier this year. Sakamoto’s music is different from what we’re used to hearing in a Kore-eda picture – they hadn’t worked together previously – but it’s both expressive and effectively used. Peter Bradshaw put it well in his Guardian review of Monster from this year’s Cannes festival (where the film won the screenplay award and the Queer Palm): ‘plangent, sad piano chords will often counterintuitively be added to a scene of apparent drama or tension, implying that the meaning of this scene has not yet been disclosed’.
As usual, Kore-eda gets lovely performances from his child actors. The adults are excellent, too, especially Eita Nagayama, whom I don’t remember seeing before. My favourite parts of the film were the descriptions of Hori’s private life and relationship with his hostess girlfriend (Mitsuki Takahata). Hori’s attention to text eventually yields important insights that help unravel some of the mystery of what’s been going on in Minato’s mind. There’s also a minor, funny example of the importance Hori attaches to the written word. As his girlfriend reminds him, he’s so fastidious about correct expression that he replies to phishing emails by telling their authors about the typos they’ve made.
14 October 2023
