Post by Dracula on Dec 21, 2023 12:10:23 GMT -5
Monster(12/15/2023)
The film looks at the mysterious goings-on at a school in the Nagano Prefecture, where it seems that a kid has been bullied by his teacher but rumors are going around that the kid may be the actual bully and that he may be disturbed and dangerous. The film adopts something of a Rashomon structure in which events are seen from alternate perspectives over the course of the film, but unlike Rashomon this isn’t a case where people are misrepresenting events in testimony to make themselves look good. Rather, events are presented objectively and the misunderstandings that occur happen in good faith as a result of nobody having the complete picture except for the viewer. On a purely structural level that’s a pretty big challenge and Kore-eda and his screenwriter pull it off pretty effectively, presenting things in new ways each time in ways that don’t feel redundant, though does require the viewer to pay pretty close attention to keep up.
One could perhaps accuse the film of being something of an extreme example of the “idiot plot,” a trope which Roger Ebert described as “any plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiot” meaning a movie with a contrived misunderstanding that could be solved if everyone would just calm down and talk to each other. However, here these people aren’t stopping and talking to each other for a reason: the film seems to be making something of a statement about the ways in which Japanese society is too quick to avoid difficult conversations and default to having people fall on their swords rather than stand up for themselves. You see this especially in these Kafka-esque meetings with school administrator sin which they just give a confused and angry mother scripted platitudes rather an answers and hope they can just apologize and bow to make her go away rather than come up with an actual useful strategy for her problems. I don’t think this is examining something that’s uniquely Japanese here either as similar dynamic, especially in schools, in a lot of places even if the cultural specifics are a little different.
Where the film is perhaps not quite as successful is in its incorporation of queer themes reminiscent of Lukas Dhont’s Close late in the film, which was an interesting idea but one that Kore-eda fees a bit too timid about and can never quite “go there” despite this seemingly being a major part of the film’s resolution. I’d say “resolution” is more generally a place the film falls a bit short of greatness with. The movie ends on a very strongly composed image but one that maybe leaves a bit too much hanging in a way that might have seemed a bit more at home in one of Kore-eda’s other looser and less heavily plotted movies than it does here. However, despite that I do think this is overall another banger from Kore-eda, one that I worry is perhaps being lost a bit in the great year that Japanese cinema has been having.
**** out of Five
Man, Hirokazu Kore-eda sure is a machine, isn’t he? This guy, likely the preeminent voice in Japanese cinema in the 21st century seems to put out a movie almost every year and while some are better than others he doesn’t seem to be compromising on quality at all in order to keep this pace up. Perhaps he has finally made some small concession to time just now in that his latest film was one that Kore-eda did not write himself. Instead Monster was written by Yuji Sakamoto, a writer I’m not familiar with and who seems to have mostly worked in Japanese television and on movies that have not crossed the Pacific. In part because of this Monster is at least a little bit of a departure from what I normally associate Kore-eda with in that the film is a bit more plot driven than what we normally get out of the filmmaker and has more of an interest in playing with structure that Kore-eda’s more straightforward “slice of life” style, but Kore-eda’s stamp as a director is still definitely identifiable here and it’s still operating from a place of exploring social mores.
The film looks at the mysterious goings-on at a school in the Nagano Prefecture, where it seems that a kid has been bullied by his teacher but rumors are going around that the kid may be the actual bully and that he may be disturbed and dangerous. The film adopts something of a Rashomon structure in which events are seen from alternate perspectives over the course of the film, but unlike Rashomon this isn’t a case where people are misrepresenting events in testimony to make themselves look good. Rather, events are presented objectively and the misunderstandings that occur happen in good faith as a result of nobody having the complete picture except for the viewer. On a purely structural level that’s a pretty big challenge and Kore-eda and his screenwriter pull it off pretty effectively, presenting things in new ways each time in ways that don’t feel redundant, though does require the viewer to pay pretty close attention to keep up.
One could perhaps accuse the film of being something of an extreme example of the “idiot plot,” a trope which Roger Ebert described as “any plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiot” meaning a movie with a contrived misunderstanding that could be solved if everyone would just calm down and talk to each other. However, here these people aren’t stopping and talking to each other for a reason: the film seems to be making something of a statement about the ways in which Japanese society is too quick to avoid difficult conversations and default to having people fall on their swords rather than stand up for themselves. You see this especially in these Kafka-esque meetings with school administrator sin which they just give a confused and angry mother scripted platitudes rather an answers and hope they can just apologize and bow to make her go away rather than come up with an actual useful strategy for her problems. I don’t think this is examining something that’s uniquely Japanese here either as similar dynamic, especially in schools, in a lot of places even if the cultural specifics are a little different.
Where the film is perhaps not quite as successful is in its incorporation of queer themes reminiscent of Lukas Dhont’s Close late in the film, which was an interesting idea but one that Kore-eda fees a bit too timid about and can never quite “go there” despite this seemingly being a major part of the film’s resolution. I’d say “resolution” is more generally a place the film falls a bit short of greatness with. The movie ends on a very strongly composed image but one that maybe leaves a bit too much hanging in a way that might have seemed a bit more at home in one of Kore-eda’s other looser and less heavily plotted movies than it does here. However, despite that I do think this is overall another banger from Kore-eda, one that I worry is perhaps being lost a bit in the great year that Japanese cinema has been having.
**** out of Five
