Tokyo Film Festival: Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hanagatami is like nothing else around – review
Dir: Nobuhiko Obayashi; Starring: Shunsuke Kubozuka, Honoka Yahagi, Shinnosuke Mitsushima, Keishi Nagatsuka, Takako Tokiwa, Tokio Emoto; cert tbc, 169 mins
Pulp cinema gets no pulpier than House, a gonzo-surrealist masterpiece from 1977 in which seven schoolgirls spend their summer break in a country mansion that keeps trying to eat them. Even today, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s film still feels daringly mad, with its helter-skelter frenzy of demonic cats, dancing skeletons and backside-chomping severed heads in buckets.
House was the first film of Obayashi’s productive and wide-ranging career, and by last year, 38 others had followed it – none of which, admittedly, made anything like the international impact of his brain-scrambling debut.
But then came an awful shock: Obayashi was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in August 2017, and given six months to live. That prompted the now 79-year-old filmmaker to press ahead with the project he’d abandoned in order to make House some 40 years ago: an adaptation of a wartime novel by Kazuo Dan called Hanagatami, or The Flower Basket, about a group of teenagers living in a small coastal community on the eve of war in the Pacific.
Despite its weighty subject matter and pin-pointed period setting, Hanagatami is avant-garde in the extreme, and being entirely unfamiliar with Dan’s original novel, I confess I struggled to rattle its stream-of-consciousness cascade of images and abstractions into a comprehensible shape.
For its epigraph, the film deploys a Dan haiku about passing flowers in bloom, and there’s something of that in the experience of watching the film too – it’s an expressionistic flurry of petal-rich colours and nectar-sweet scents, far easier to soak up than decode.
For one thing, although the main characters are between the ages of 16 and 21, many of the cast members are considerably older than their characters: not least Shunsuke Kubozuka, who turns 36 next month. He plays the wide-eyed Toshihiko, who arrives in the village from Amsterdam to live with his aunt Keiko (Takako Tokiwa) and her daughter Mina (Honoka Yahagi), who’s laid low with that elegant movie-world strain of tuberculosis that causes much tragic-picturesque hacking up of crimson blood on snowy fabric.
Early on, Obayashi contrives an extraordinary image in which a red petal falling from a rose is momentarily transformed into a splash of gore as it hits the table-top, then returns to it again and again, as both a means of foreshadowing a specific loss, and a broader memento mori for a generation soon to be torn up by war, its lost souls squandered, its survivors scarred.
Toshihiko’s teenage life is defined by its harmony with nature – think naked bareback horse rides on the beach at night – and also his participation in the village’s traditions, including a parade of floats bedecked with lanterns and floating on a sea of revellers.
As in many of Hanagatami’s more elaborate sequences, the components of every shot have been cut and pasted together from separate sources, like collages in a scrap book: skies are impossibly colourful, the ocean looks as flat as a theatre backdrop, processions stretch back for miles in perspective-defying, pin-sharp focus. And as in House, the score is relentless, but it’s also swoony, string-led and obvious – far too much noodling around with Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 – and, for me, soon became the one part of the film that tipped over from incessant into gruelling.
Yet even with its myriad confusions and frustrations, there’s nothing else quite like Hanagatami around. That may not be the unqualified endorsement it was for House – or at least, it isn’t yet. Ask me again in another 40 years.
