The Ones That Stayed
Had a list of Japanese films somewhere—made it years ago, when making lists felt like a productive use of time. Never finished it. But the films stuck, which is the only part that mattered.
Kikujiro’s Summer is the first one I think of. Takeshi Kitano playing some useless guy who gets dragged into babysitting a kid for a summer, driving around the countryside. The film just sits there. Doesn’t push. You watch it and it makes you feel okay about things, which sounds corny but it works. That’s all cinema is sometimes—permission to slow down.
Battle Royale is completely different. Same director, but a school class wakes up on a locked island with weapons and a simple instruction: kill each other. The film doesn’t wink at you about how absurd that is. It just watches it happen. When you’re young you think you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to—something transgressive about survival and cruelty that polite society hides. Later you realize the film isn’t revealing anything new, it’s just not looking away. The question it plants stays with you though: what would you do? You can’t answer it, not honestly, which is why you keep thinking about it.
Kamikaze Girls is lighter. Two girls, completely incompatible—one deep in the lolita fashion thing, the other a biker type with no patience for decoration. They find out they’re actually the same person underneath, or close enough. The film just watches this happen without making a big deal of it. Sometimes that’s the whole point.
Nobody Knows is harder to look at. Four kids in Tokyo, abandoned by their mother, who decided she couldn’t do the job anymore. The film just observes them figuring out how to keep going. Not in a dramatic way, just the daily machinery of surviving. There’s something almost unbearable about watching it done so carefully, without sentiment. Life is like that though—sad in a way that never quite deserves the name.
Then there’s The Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai, which I don’t even know how to describe. The lead actress is an actual porn performer, and the film is this completely unhinged satire where she gets shot in the head, becomes omniscient, finds George W. Bush’s severed finger, and fucks her way through the cast. It shouldn’t work. It’s absurd and crude and the politics are cartoonish. But something about the sheer committed weirdness of it, the rage underneath the comedy, makes it genius. Or close enough.
I was supposed to rank these, build some kind of definitive list. The project lives on as this fragment—a few films, no hierarchy. Which is fine. The list was never the point anyway. The films were.