By STEPHEN HUNT Special to the Daily Press
While Chinese films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers have become such a dominant sub-genre that North American movie audiences tend to think they represent all Asian cinema, a new generation of young Japanese filmmakers such as Hirokuzu Kore-Eda and Naomi Kawase are making films that owe their inspiration to Dogma 95, John Cassavettes and the films of Mike Leigh.
Kore-Eda’s latest, “Nobody Knows,” which opened in New York on Feb. 4 and Los Angeles on Feb. 11, was shot on digital video, features sparse dialogue, urban Japanese cityscapes that owe a debt to Volker Schlondorff, and long, virtually improvised scenes featuring a posse of Japanese children between 3 and 15 years old. “Nobody Knows” is to Flying Daggers what Bukowski is to W.H. Auden: They’re both poets, but the similarities end there.
Kore-Eda, 41, who developed his distinctive style shooting documentaries for Japanese television, was in Toronto last September for the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about “Nobody Knows.”
“I would say no other movies came to mind when I was making this film,” Kore-Eda said, in response to a reporters’ observation that “Nobody Knows” didn’t seem very Japanese at all.
“I was just trying to weave together a story through the performances of the children. In point of fact,” Kore-Eda added, “especially in the second half, there’s very little dialogue which is quite a departure for Japanese children’s films — so many Japanese have said it doesn’t feel like a Japanese film either — and some French critics have said it feels French.”
Not coincidentally, Kore-Eda is something of a French critical darling. His 1995 debut, “Maborosi,” won the Camera d’Or for Best New Director at Cannes. His third film, “Distance” was a finalist for the Palm d’Or and “Nobody Knows” won the 2004 Best Actor at Cannes for 14-year-old Yuya Yagira’s portrayal of the oldest son Akira.
“Nobody Knows” begins when a young Japanese woman and her teenage son Akira move into a new apartment. As soon as they get inside, the story takes a twist when the luggage turns out not to contain personal belongings, but rather three more young children. As the eldest helps the youngest out of his luggage, his first question reveals a matter-of-factness about the facts of this family’s life that is heartbreaking in its simplicity. “Was it hot?” he asks. This is followed by their mother issuing a straightforward declaration of the house’s one unbreakable rule: Pointing to the three little children, she says, “You don’t go outside.” Shortly thereafter, she disappears, abandoning them in order to pursue a singing career.
“Nobody Knows” originated out of an actual event and Kore-Eda’s own personal memories of childhood. “I wasn’t abandoned as a child, but remember the anxiety of waiting for a parent to come home, the loneliness of walking home alone after you’ve fought with your friends, plus the (cast of) fantastic kids, watching them and seeing a scene that would play well — a combination of all that,” he said.
For all its international sensibilities, “Nobody Knows” can hardly be considered commercial. Not only is it in Japanese and close to two and a half hours long, but Kore-Eda’s storytelling is almost obsessively haphazard: The film simply seems to land in the midst of the everyday struggles of a group of Japanese children who have been abandoned by their mother. Also, in a film world where class struggle seems to have been resolved by eliminating everyone but the upper and upper-middle class from them, “Nobody Knows,” like the films of Mike Leigh, is set among the urban underclass.
However, the film somehow still manages — in the manner of other similarly-themed films about abandoned children such as Hector Babenco’s Pixote and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay — to fluidly combine the innate playfulness and sweetness of childrens’ game playing within a heartbreaking scenario of child abandonment and urban ennui.
“I think that for both myself and the cameraman (Yutaka Yamasaki), our goal was to get the audience to cherish the children in front of us that we were watching,” Kore-Eda said. “Every scene was story-boarded and the dialogue written in advance, but the truth is the dialogue was very much based on their natural language written at play,” he adds, explaining both his methodology and his gift for coaxing extraordinary performances out of untrained actors. The Japanese film industry — unlike China’s — has been moribund for several years now. Japanese independent films such as those made by Kore-Eda and his protégés Yusuke Iseya (Kakuto) and Miwa Nishikawa (Wild Berries) are as likely to be ignored in Japan as they are to go undistributed in the U.S. Yet, much like the children in “Nobody Knows,” Kore-Eda remains undeterred — as if the very act of making his brand of films is a game in itself.
“And there were times,” he added, as if he had somehow claimed too much credit from his cast and wished to make amends, “when I just shot them at play.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 11, 2005. Read the original PDF.