Wara no Tate

After seeing Miike’s new film, one could almost say that the situation with Japanese cinema looks very good. After all, we would be hard pressed to find anywhere else the equivalent of a star-studded, big-budget blockbuster in which the main attraction isn’t action and plot twists, but rather ethical issues that get under the skin of viewers. Furthermore, the film ranked among the year’s fifteen top-grossing domestic films. But on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that everything is unfortunately still how it was before. The Japanese film industry suffered for years from a lack of original ideas, for which producers are not willing to provide funding. Unfortunately, this is true not only of the mainstream, but also for the indie segment, from which fittingly no new talent has emerged for a number of years. The only certainty remains a handful of still active directors from the ranks of filmmakers who gained international renown at the turn of the millennium. One of the unfortunately diminishing group of such veterans is Miike, who has smoothly transitioned from the area of indie productions and video genre flicks to the mainstream over the past decade. Despite the certain categorisation of his work in the area of shonen films, here he is nevertheless continuing with the trend of using each new film to expand his portfolio with a previously untried genre. Shield of Straw again demonstrates the universal nature and precision craftsmanship of its director, who for the first time has dived into the waters of spectacular modern thrillers with a number of crowd and exterior sequences. In accordance with the rule that Miike always manages to precisely grasp a screenplay written by someone else so that he gets the maximum out of it, this time he leaves aside any humour and instead focuses on the gradual build-up of the premise. As previously mentioned, the action here does not in any way serve as an attraction, but as an expressive catalyst of the initial situation and the relationships between the characters. The regular repetition of the same questions of morality is not an error; rather, it is intentional, as attention is returned to the core of the narrative after every dramatic event and new revelation. Thus we have the age-old clash of order and chaos,  elaborated as a conflict between adherence to social rules and evil in opposition to traditional values. Unlike in The Dark Knight, which leave it up to a comic-book hero to settle the same conflict on behalf of humanity, in Shield of Straw everything rests on the shoulders of five cops with different personalities, who have the task of transporting to court a brutal murderer and paedophile, on whose head a victim’s grandfather has placed a bounty of one billion yen.  Though the narrative touches on the financial crisis and the indebtedness of society, the main focus is on the uncomfortable questions of whether and at what cost society’s system of rules can stand up against absolute evil, which the film provocatively leaves unanswered. Though most of the film’s positives are derived from the Kazuhiro Kiuchi’s book on which the film is based, under Miike’s direction the original source work nevertheless receives a more than respectable rendering that superbly escalates its urgency and makes an unsettling impression despite its commercial targeting. (2013.12.16) (kevesebbet) (több)