Sandome no satsujin

Hirokazu Kore-eda (2017)

The victims of the first two murders, back in the 1980s, were loan sharks.  Takashi Misumi, the man who killed them, would have received a death sentence but for the leniency of the trial judge.  Decades later and shortly after his release from prison, Misumi is charged with murder again.  Tomoaki Shigemori, the high-profile lawyer brought in to head his defence team, is also the son of the judge who saved Misumi’s life all those years ago.

The BBFC notice for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest warns of ‘brief, strong violence’.  This occurs immediately, in a sequence describing the titular crime.   The notice is accurate enough – on a deserted riverside one night, a man beats another man to death with a wrench – although the killing takes place under cover of darkness and with Kore-eda’s camera at a discreet distance, until it closes in on the bloodstained face of Misumi (Kōji Yakusho).  The climax to The Third Murder is the courtroom drama of his trial.   But the intervening film is less of a departure from Kore-eda’s usual domestic territory than the basic plot components might suggest.  Misumi is, for Shigemori (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his colleagues (Kôtarô Yoshida and Shinnosuke Mitsushima), an exasperating client.  He keeps changing his mind about important details of the killing and why – at one point, whether – he’s responsible for it.  Family ties, ruptures and secrets are essential to the piece, as they have been in much of Kore-eda’s previous work.

Responses to the film may vary according to whether capital punishment is still a fact of national life.  In Japan, The Third Murder has been received as a powerful abolitionist contribution to an urgent continuing debate about the death penalty.  Western European audiences are likely to see the film differently (if, like this viewer, they know little about the conventions that govern Japanese homicide trials and penalties, they’ll find it instructive).  In After the Storm, Kore-eda seemed ill at ease when the story moved for a time into the world of private detective work and The Third Murder, as a ‘legal thriller’ (Wikipedia), is underwhelming.  As a search for truth – a philosophical why-dunnit – it’s more interesting, even if (intentionally?) frustrating.  The differing accounts of how the crime occurred and the motive behind it naturally call to mind Rashomon, with the several perspectives of Kurosawa’s classic replaced by several versions of events offered by a single character.  Kore-eda uses Shigemori’s dreams not only to suggest how obsessed with the crime the lawyer is becoming but also to reduce gradually the audience’s certainty that we know what really happened.

A Rashomon echo is heard beyond Misumi’s shifting accounts – in contesting explanations of the physical infirmity of Sakie (Suzu Hirose, the title character in Our Little Sister), the daughter of Yamanaka, the murdered man.  According to her mother (Yuki Saito), Sakie’s bad leg is a congenital condition; according to Sakie, the legacy of her jumping from a window when she was a girl.  The last explanation of the murder in the film is that Yamanaka, a crooked factory owner, had repeatedly raped his daughter and that his employee Misumi, who found out, killed him to save Sakie from further abuse.  Although Misumi is estranged from his daughter and there are growing tensions between the recently divorced Shigemori and his (Aju Makita), these other relationships aren’t significant enough.  They’re designed to complement the crucial father-daughter story – and parts of a design is all they come across as.  (The symbolism of Misumi’s daughter sharing with Sakie a limp is weak.)  Nor does Kore-eda go far in exploring the relationship between Shigemori and his elderly, ailing father (Isao Hashisume) or the moral implications of the latter’s part in Misumi’s history.  Mention is made of Judge Shigemori’s being indirectly responsible for the third murder but the idea isn’t probed.

The most dramatically absorbing element of The Third Murder is the affable, quietly spoken Misumi’s increasingly unnerving effect on the man defending him.  Misumi, who tells Shigemori he’s spent many years regretting that he was ever born, says finally that he feels his life has acquired value in what he’s done to help Sakie.  His mid-trial change of plea, which effectively destroys Shigemori’s chance of getting a prison sentence for him, further protects the young woman – from having to give evidence to the court about her father’s sexual behaviour.  Kore-eda makes unusually imaginative use of that familiar screen partition – the glass dividing a prisoner from the person visiting or interviewing them.   Misumi places the splayed fingers of one hand against the glass, explaining to Shigemori that doing so helps him get to know better the person he’s talking to.  Later on, the prisoner appears to be able to read the lawyer’s mind.  As Misumi, the gently charismatic Kōji Yakusho gives the outstanding performance.  The eloquent, often wintry landscapes of The Third Murder are photographed by Mikiya Takimoto.  The effective score – spare, melancholy strings and piano – is by Ludovico Einaudi.

27 March 2018