Cause for growing concern: the increasing trend of Covid cringe in the arts. Originally relegated to the realm of content creators singing parody songs about their favorite pharmaceutical companies, the most basic of observations related to the pandemic have found their way into the supposedly elevated counter-programming of film festivals and art houses. Some filmmakers are just now discovering screenlife out of necessity - the first Unfriended came out in 2014 for context - and will most likely ditch the format once they’re told it’s “safe.” What the makers of the Covid cringe all share are insights no deeper than it’s difficult to stay at home and that human connection is mighty important. No attention paid to institutions seeking control, mass media endorsed public division, and rising globo-cap authoritarianism. Don’t look up indeed.
Still, many great films made the rounds last year and in some you can feel the constraints of working with smaller crews and fewer locations but that was going to come with lower budgeted territory regardless. Hopefully the true iconoclasts can comment on the current reality being created and find a way for audiences to see it no matter the response.
The films on this list had to be released in Japan in 2021, receive US distribution in 2021, or have a festival screening in 2021.
The first two are ranked, the rest are in reverse alphabetical order.
The Town of Headcounts//Shinji Araki
Men drowning in debt, a woman escaping an abusive husband, someone living in a cyber-cafe being taken forcefully by dudes in matching uniforms. They all find retreat in a town where everything is provided to them as long as the town’s set of rules are followed. There seems to be a lack of filmmakers tackling the world of today and the more pressing matters of surveillance, speech control, information wars, and ultimately how the oligarchs distract and maintain power. No identity politics, no safety of period pieces or fancy future-trips, just a low-budget allegory of today where most of the cast wears hoodies. The film’s understatedness sets it apart from other speculative fiction where too much worldbuilding and thinly veiled critiques of easy targets never rise above juvenile social commentary. Instead of a smug tone saying “this is where we’re headed,” we’re already there and can parse out what real world happenings each moment might be referring to. A big net is cast over many an issue; intertitles flash onscreen with some statistic like the number of those missing in Japan, personal bankruptcies, homeless and unemployed, voter turnout. Almost like it’s all connected. There’s even the depiction of crisis actors but it might be a metaphor pointed at bigger targets. The film doesn’t punch down on those living in the town, it’s sympathetic to how hard it is just to survive through new world orders and great resets. There’s a sophistication to the film, on the topic of speech for instance, it doesn’t scream just “censorship!” but instead depicts how speech is controlled, the allowance of both critical and negative writing tricks those into seeing freedom. It’s so richly detailed that no one’s going to see the same dystopia. For me, it’s hard not to find shades of New Normal in all of it.
Sasaki in My Mind//Takuya Uchiyama
In a similar mode to A Story of Yonosuke. Between this and Remain in Twilight it was a strong year for stories about suddenly remembering an old friend you haven’t seen in years, a species of the haunted-by-past genus. An aspiring actor starts thinking about the class clown he was friends with. The one who told him he would make for a good actor and would strip down at a moment’s notice whenever his friends egged him on, chanting his name. It’s the same one he had a glimpse of his broken home outside of school and wonders if there was something more he could have done. This one works because of how dead inside the main guy is, making it a slow burn emotionally until the finale lets loose and tries to disguise how deeply tragic it all is.
Wife of a Spy//Kiyoshi Kurosawa
This one received a bit more attention than To the Ends of the Earth which despite being only a few years old is in need of reassessment. Maybe its lack of a genre (suspense travelogue?) hurt it where Wife of a Spy apparently has enough to sell audiences on it from title alone. It just sounds sexy and readymade for Step-Family of a Spy reinterpretation. Even a masterpiece like Tokyo Sonata could still be pigeonholed in the “Japanese family drama” genre. This is not to say that there’s nothing of merit in Wife of a Spy, it’s just another success in Kurosawa’s streak of nebulously reinventing himself. Instead of Brechtian music cues, a purposefully phony and digital look achieves the same function. It makes for a good buddy-cop clash with the genuine intrigue of its espionage tale that is mirrored and repurposed in the film-within-a-film that the spy works on as a hobbyist. Once everything has gone to pieces Yu Aoi resembles Setsuko Hara in No Regrets for Our Youth, you watch as she develops ideologically in a performance that makes you lean in.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy//Ryusuke Hamaguchi
The almost Parasite level praise Drive My Car is getting scared me off and toward Hamaguchi’s other release of ‘21 which turned out to be extremely playful back-and-forths between three sets of pairs. More importantly though, fuck Hamaguchi for saying Naruse should replace Kurosawa as one of the “three most important Japanese directors.” Just make it four, dummy. Also notice the lack of Rohmer on his Criterion list, trying to divert attention from obvious influences.
Sayonara TV//Koji Hijikata
Are there still good reasons to watch corporate news? WMDs, Russiagate, horse dewormer. It’s more entertaining looking for flubs and lies than it is a source of info. Indie journalist Alison Morrow came from TV news and details a working environment not necesarilly full of ill intent just not conducive for reporting that’s given enough time for research or allowed to challenge narratives. This documentary of the daily workings of news station Tokai TV gives a similar impression from focusing on three different employees: a semi-popular anchor, a young reporter needing confidence, and a more jaded journalist working behind the cameras. The jaded one is the most interesting, questioning the authenticity of the documentarians and even lamenting the ability for adversarial reporting in a job at the station. Did you know that the US is still trying to extradite Assange? Like all docs should, it makes sure to throw things in there to remind you that you’re watching something constructed and to not just assume things are how they are being presented.
Remain in Twilight//Daigo Matusi
The other memory-of-a-friend film. This one is a bit more broad than Sasaki (Kisetsu Fujiwara is in both by the way) but it’s able to mix it up by having the group of friends able to collectively interact with an imaginary version of the one no longer able to be there. All five of them each get the time to go over their individual connections with him as they gather for the wedding of two old classmates. This gives a much more detailed look at the group dynamic. A lot of the humor works including a scene stealing cameo from Atsuko Maeda. But again, no matter the antics, they’ll hit a wall reminding them you can’t go back to make things right. But it’s a real hoot to watch them try.
JUNK HEAD//Takahide Hori
I can’t really remember anything about the story or worldbuilding of this stop-motion adventure but thankfully there’s not much of it. I think there was something about humans not being able to reproduce but they can live much longer somehow? Doesn’t really matter. Instead, so many moments and small details have staying power like the saga of a trek to get a lunch pail’s worth of sausage link like growths that are harvested off the backs of people, which are something of a delicacy. There’s also the shyster who tries to con the amnesiac protagonist (who is a Fourth Industrial Revolution abomination) into handing those snacks over. Each diversion is littered with all sorts of odd little details that together start to naturally build a ruleset for how things work in this world. These sort of sci-fi pictures seem to work better as ontological playthings than as over explainers that make the eyes go glassy. JUNK HEAD is a good, gnarly time. It was also made by one guy but that’s just more marketing material than anything substantial to how you should interact with the film.
It’s a Summer Film!//Soushi Matsumoto
A trio of girls drool over a VHS quality Shintaro Katsu during their film club meetings. They’re working on a good old fashioned chanbara picture, competing with the popular girl whose production of a vapid romance always seems to be close by. The assembled ragtag Fuck Bombers look even more ragtag when standing in the same shot as the yes frills other production. It’s another one of those let’s-make-a-movie movies (a plot type which I’m just now realizing has a lot in common with the heist film) but there’s a genre shift so straight faced and unassuming it’s shocking but reflects the feeling that anything is possible which only makes sense given the youth of the characters. A handful of the micro-budgeted films on this list achieve that feeling of gathering your friends to make a movie in someone’s backyard which should be mandatory for a film about characters embarking on a cinematic endeavor with not even a shoestring. What’s most impressive is how the film finds the ways that jidai-geki and sci-fi relate to coming of age. The finale (which multiple characters even say is the climax of the story as they pull out their smart phones to film it) is able to blend being inspirational with the bittersweetness of knowing how the future has a way of destroying the memory of the present.
Extraneous Matter-Complete Edition//Kenichi Ugana
Different vignettes chart the arrival and departure of tentacled invaders. During their time on Earth, humans find that these diddling grays can tap into the pleasure centers of the brain. With a few more stories (I remember there being four) this would be even more like Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles where each section is a different snapshot of the ill-fated cohabitation.
BOLT//Kaizo Hayashi
Three episodes charting ripples of 3/11. Each one starring Masatoshi Nagase. The opening segment he and some other power plant workers try to stop a radiation leak from a loose bolt. After that he’s cleaning the abandoned homes that surround the power plant. And it concludes with his own Christmas Carol when his auto repair shop is visited by a dead ringer for his wife. Out of all the segments, the first one could work the best on its own. It’s tense and constructed elegantly by way of less is more. Both the older men and the younger ones have reasons why they should be the ones to sacrifice themselves. The other segments are familiar. In the Ryuichi Sakamoto documentary he too enters a high radiation zone to walk through unlivable homes with the owners who had to flee. Hayashi’s penchant for the abstract is what saves the segments from being like a decade’s worth of post-tsunami films. The new restoration of his To Sleep So as to Dream was making the rounds this past year now how about the Maiku Hama trilogy getting some love?
The Blue Danube//Akira Ikeda
Everyday a small group of soldiers set up shop at the river and fire across at the matching soldiers firing back at them. This war has been going on so long that no one in the village can remember how it started. Sort of “The Lottery” crossed with theater of the absurd. The characters talk in circles through each other, each with uniform deadpan delivery. It’s only when one of the soldiers is relocated to the army’s marching band and takes up an instrument, that there’s any hint of questioning why they villainize the village across the river. It’s a bit hokey of a sentiment but maybe it’s true. The characters - unquestioning and pretty much sleepwalking - mosey through bureaucratic mazes which allows the war to carry on. It sounds familiar.
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes//Junta Yamaguchi
One monitor shows a minute into the future and the other one displays a minute in the past. A group of extremely average friends discover this, accept it rather easily, and have a hard time trying to figure out what to do with it. The fact that it’s only a minute in either direction results in scheming that’s hilariously low stakes despite the high-concept. Most of the buzz around this compared it to One Cut of the Dead. They’re both crowd pleasers and this whole thing is done as a oner like the opening half of One Cut. Most likely, this will prove more rewarding on rewatches where One Cut’s opening got hard to sit through on subsequent viewings. Also imagining the planning it must have took to get the timings right on the mise en abyme is a real mind fuck.
B/B//Kosuke Nakahama
The backdrop for this one is a lot of fun: the Olympics are cancelled due to committee corruption and some cult attempted a reboot of the ‘95 subway gas attack. It doesn’t sound that bad but might be a way to explain the lack of attention given to the murder of a convenience store owner. A suspect - actually thirteen of them - is questioned by a detective/psychiatrist duo. As the circumstances around the murder are revealed it’s fair to say that those more topical distractions kept people blind or indifferent from “quotidian” tragedies. The multiple personality murder mystery has a dark view of the world. The high-schooler’s bickering personalities are universal to anyone oscillating between hope and despair.
Ayako Tachibana Wants to Go Viral//Sato Amane
An aspiring influencer couple are being haunted while the husband sleeps around at his office day job. The meek OL that he sets his sites on has her own fascination with a camgirl. Enough so that she will duck into a bathroom stall at work to catch a livestream on her phone and rub one out. The wife is back home stuck in the comment threads of her own videos. The film switches from one POV to the next, Peepshow style. It works as both a stylistic choice for the pinku stuff and a natural fit for the attempts at horror. And while this kind of POV is not inherently “connected” it comes off as a social media filtered visual language. We’re distanced from these people even though we are “seeing through their eyes,” which is perhaps the most pointed commentary this film achieves on creators of content. The film could definitely have gone much further with almost all aspects of note: the sex, horror, influencer satire, the POV switching gimmick, and the bit of screenlife in an editing software. Still, it’s a quickie at 72min and worth a watch just to appreciate its ambition.
Along the Sea//Akio Fujimoto
This past year has seen the idea that healthcare is a human right become worthy of bumper sticker status than an actual ideal people hold. “Progressives” in the states that had campaigned on it have ditched it in favor of “access to healthcare,” and during a pandemic no less. Even countries known for their universal healthcare have leaders that run their mouth and policy in contradiction. In Along the Sea three Vietnamese illegals find work doing labour at the docks. One of them needs medical care but can’t get far without an ID or proof of insurance. Most of the film focuses on the minutiae of her attempts to find care which puts you in some realist trance and it’s over way too soon.
All About “Chiaki Mayumura” (Provisional)//Hajime Matsuura
A by-the-numbers doc about the pop idol Chiaki Mayumura soon shifts into a chronicling of the underground cloning project with Mayumura as its test subject. She goes from creating music in her bedroom to achieving what appears to be a growing cult idol status to being stuck in the lab, monitored and unable to be a better Chiaki Mayumura than her clones. They compete for a chance to perform in the concerts for the outside world. They’re tested on choreography and vocals. Despite being the original creator of the music, Mayumura gets bested by the clones, the cloning process is taking a toll. A fractured self that’s lacking in confidence isn’t new territory for self-aware artists trying to deconstruct but the creative energy and earnestness in this film you want to attribute to Mayumura. If you think you’ve got this docu/fiction hybrid figured out regarding which is which, it keeps you on your toes asking “what’s real” regarding more personal matters.
