“This isn’t a wedding, this is a funeral!” spits an angry wedding crasher in Oshima’s Night and Fog in Japan (Nihon no yoru to kiri). The wedding, not a particularly happy one at this point, is between two members of the left-wing student movement in Japan; the funeral is for the movement itself, its members retreating into bourgeois comfort, their dreams and ideals interred along with them. It’s the fallout after the bloody protests surrounding the signing of a treaty between Japan and the United States — and the death of a former comrade — that haunts the film’s characters, but it remains politely repressed until the accusations fly across the room like bullets. Unlike the “spy” they captured earlier (and from whom they extract no information), the guests (and bride, and groom) end up reluctantly spilling their secrets and suspicions.
I really dislike words like “impenetrable” or “difficult”, so I’ll use the word “challenging” instead; Night and Fog in Japan was easily the most challenging film I’ve seen so far in the Oshima retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive. It requires the viewer, for starters, to have a better historical context for the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. (I’ll hazard a very dangerous guess here and write that the tenor of the protests were probably along the same lines as the anti-U.S. protests in the Philippines: about state sovereignty, the role of the U.S. military in domestic security, and the presence of American bases on native soil.)
There is also much ideological squabbling within the organization: some, humorously, about the role of dancing to the revolution, and, more seriously, about how “despair and nihilism” has mired the movement. Oshima clearly wants the love triangle at the core of the narrative to exemplify the paranoid and petty disagreements within the left (I think), but I was unfamiliar with the issues, and it didn’t help that it takes a while for the relatively large cast and their respective characters to settle down. (But there’s Fumio Watanabe and Akiko Koyama and Kei Sato again!) My fault, of course; I should really be attempting this after a second viewing.
For me, the genius here is in the explicitly theatrical staging of spatio-temporal collapse: the lights go out, characters are isolated from each other by harsh, accusatory spotlights, and suddenly we’re in a flashback (and flashback within flashback). Oshima uses the camera like an interrogator, whipsawing laterally from one end of the hall to another; it makes the execution chamber in Death by Hanging (1968) almost airy in comparison. (In more sedate moments, the camera pans across the wedding party, pulling in and out of focus like a sniper selecting a target.) Every scene is nocturnal, as if all of Japan has been plunged into endless night, the fog swirling menacingly outside.
Popularity: 2%
Post a Comment