Anyone who follows any artform closely — in this case, cinema, but it’s equally true for music, painting, sculpture, literature, what have you — knows this very specific feeling. You hear the name of an artist, and, as the meme goes, you realize that, in fact, you haven’t heard that name in years. Artists emerge, and they often just drop out of sight. This isn’t always due to a drop in the quality of their work, although sometimes it is. A critical establishment that thrives on newness and discovery can often allow promising makers to fall through the cracks.
A case in point is the Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita. He started working in 1996, and broke through on the Western festival circuit with his second feature, No One’s Ark (2003). It was a sort of relationship-based road movie about two young losers trying to find their way into adulthood. No One’s Ark was championed by Asian cinema aficionados, in particular Tony Rayns, who was then a programmer for the Vancouver International Film Festival. Following the success of No One’s Ark, Yamashita seemed to be going from strength to strength. His filmmaking comedy Ramblers (also 2003) got some attention, but three subsequent films were particularly well received: Linda Linda Linda (2005), a fast-paced comedy about a teenage rock band; The Matsugane Potshot Affair (2007), a black comedy about a violent crime in a backwater town; and A Gentle Breeze in the Village (2007), a Kore-eda-esque coming-of-age tale about two schoolkids who live in an overwhelmingly geriatric town.
Yamashita’s films of this period were defined by a wry, bemused outlook, the sense that our foibles, amusing though they may be, were also what made us most obviously human. But at this point, Yamashita appears to have taken a turn into genre material, primarily gritty crime films and overly sincere, Shunji Iwai-like teen-pop vehicles. For the most part, international film festivals stopped caring. But this year, Yamashita returns, with two new films screening at Fantasia. Swimming in a Sand Pool bears some resemblance to the carefully observed young adult films that made his reputation.
Confession, however, does not. Clocking in at a lean 76 minutes, this is essentially 10 minutes of premise followed by an hour of grueling, bizarre consequences. The story is almost negligible. Three high school friends were in the climbing club: Asai (Toma Ikuta), his girlfriend Sayuri (Nao), and Korean exchange student Jiyong (Yang Ik-june). One day, Sayuri dies on a climb, and the two male friends subsequently go up the mountain once a year in her honor. But on a climb 16 years after Sayuri’s death, Jiyong is badly hurt, and the two men are caught in a punishing snowstorm. Thinking he’s about to die, Jiyong makes the titular confession to Asai: he murdered Sayuri.
Alas, the pair make it to a cabin, and it looks like they will survive. This makes Jiyong’s “deathbed” confession, shall we say, problematic. Soon, Jiyong has gone berserk and is trying his best to kill Asai. The ultraviolent cat-and-mouse game, complete with broken limbs, snapped necks, stabbing, bludgeoning, and a great deal of screaming, comprises the majority of Confession’s runtime. While Yamashita certainly makes the most of his claustrophobic scenario, there’s not much here beyond some prime red meat for genre hounds. There is a Grand Guignol spirit to the men’s makeshift gladiator contest, although there seem to be some small cheats. If you try too hard to figure out the layout of the cabin, you’ll notice some clear discrepancies.
Perhaps more troubling are some ideological undertones that Yamashita seems quite unconcerned about. Sayuri, for example, exists solely as the dead girl, guileless in flashbacks and with no identity apart from being an object of guilt. (If one were conducting a negative Bechdel Test, Confession would pass with flying colors.) But there are also the rather disturbing implications of the Asai/Jiyong relationship. There is, of course, a long history of anti-Korean racism in Japan, with Koreans stereotyped as being violent, barbaric, and untrustworthy. (This is the explicit theme of Nagisa Oshima’s 1968 masterwork Death by Hanging.) Jiyong embodies these traits, and although we learn that Asai is hardly blameless, the Korean man goes on about how his Japanese friends “looked down on him,” shouting at Asai like a red-state MAGA dude railing against the cultural elites. None of this exactly cancels out Confession’s more straightforward, midnight-movie pleasures, but it does suggest that Yamashita’s compassionate humanism has taken a backseat to grindhouse gore. Based on his earlier work, the director is probably capable of reconciling the two impulses, and the fact he didn’t bother implies a workmanlike, job-for-hire attitude, a subtle disdain for the project and its audience.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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