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Dir. Yoshihiko Matsui
Noisy Requiem is set in desolate places. Junk yards. Building
rooftops. Red light districts and pachinko parlours. Obscure business offices.
Backyard fields of weeds and industrial concrete. Any contact with the wider
world, in this independently funded film, taking my steps into the rarely
available jishu eiga underground films, is 'stolen' with documentarian
capturing of the images without permits. Or distant like there are glass walls
and ceilings baring the characters of the film to be noticed. In some cases the
outside world runs away from them. It is mostly slum area. Shin Sekai, Osaka, a
place of immense homelessness. The entire economic and social ups and downs
visible on the locations onscreen like if you could film the council houses
here in my own country. There is a violent young man whose only existing love
for another, any love to anyone as he may even hate himself, is for a female
mannequin, planning to raise a child with her. Going as far as giving her the
organs needed from unwilling donors. A man and his very young sister, his care
for her beyond convention. A homeless man who drags around a tree stump the
shape of the lower half of a woman, perfectly so you wonder if a poor tree nymph
was killed and cut up for firewood. A midget brother and sister, who run a
sewer cleaning business, she feeling the immense distance from the world and
progressing to random acts of destruction in a need she may not even know of. It
sounds purposely transgressive. It is trangressive. It breaks so many taboos.
It sounds absurd and the Japanese answer to Pink Flamingos (1972) before Takashi
Miike's Visitor Q (2001) came to
existence. People would dismiss it as another example of weird Japanese cinema,
but with only the films to go by themselves, in their own worlds and contexts,
many of them are more reflecting and artistically minded than you think.
Noisy Requiem is black and white. Beautiful in its ugliness and
ugly in its beauty. Made independently, director Yoshihiko Matsui used the fact he was making a guerrilla movie to
his advantage. Handheld cameras move with the dexterity I've only seen in the
films of Akio Jissoji. Encapsulated,
as the violent young man berates two disabled veterans of World War II, by the
cameraman running around the water fountain behind them, on the other side secretly
hearing on them and not getting involved, twirling around, thinking better of
it, and running back to watch defencelessly as the violent man eventually gets
a claw hammer out of his back pocket. Tinny synth doesn't detract from the
film, and there is moments of tender piano music to counteract this music
choice. To get high, almost eye-of-God shots, someone sat on a roof. Recording
in one scene schoolgirls, like the pigeons the young man kills in the
beginning, fleeing on mass like running,
liquid mercury. A rooftop was set on fire, and the person(s) who hid filming
real fireman assess the damage never got caught and managed to get the footage
into the film. Independent cinema here is suicidal in its bravery in getting
the shots desired. In trying anything. Blurring the lines between fiction and
real when it seems characters are hassling real people. It is not a static
camera in a room filming dull conversation between the characters no one cares
about like in other films.
You are forced to follow
characters who have no moral grounding. There is incest. Blood. The desire for
another literally consuming. But Matsui
is on their side, having called this a film about true love. "True
love", such an odd choice of words at first against such nihilistic, taboo
breaking material where someone shows their love to another, a mannequin, by
licking bird shit off their cheeks. But even if the characters could never be
real, at least to a rational, "normal" society, the film is calm,
lingeringly slow to the point you follow it carefully. Rationalising this behaviour
from the characters' perspectives. Some of it is so twisted its sickly humorous,
but you feel pity, then ask if they're the miscreants or if the ordinary public
barely seen are worse. The only people from this part of the society, who are
sympathetic and aren't faceless, are two schoolgirls in the beginning. One
recounts the dream she had which is the central idea of the film, a white dove
prevented from getting seeds by pigeons, and turning into a black crow who
kills to survive. To live in this film's outskirts, you have to even harm other,
and normality itself can be even more grotesque and sadistic, as takes place on
a public bus full of bulling, sideshow caricatures. The main characters for all
their crimes they commit are trying to rationalise their own existences let
alone the one outside theirs.
At two hours, nearly forty minutes,
Noisy Requiem becomes trance-like. You
stop being offended by the content because you're living through the
characters' eyes for so long, the daily rhythms, that you live in their place
outside of perceived existence. Switching between characters, the film becomes
confusing at times, what actually is happening in reality up for debate, but
keeps a consistent and enticing tone. Fantasy eventually breaks through to sit alongside
the disgusting, vomit and blood matched by rivers existing on rooftops and a
split in time, a split of a body into two, long before Uncle Boonmie Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) did it too
twenty two years later. If the film is depressing, it at least gives you characters
to care about. If its vulgar and offensive, it at least lingers on the
aftermaths with thought, that causes you to actually feel pain than let the
incidents merely pass, as if they were acceptable, as in politer mainstream
films. If it's rough, messy in presentation, maybe too long, it at least tried.
And trying means more when you see a film like this that feels something.
Characters searching for true love. All from an area completely isolated from
the rest of the world. The homeless, the lost, the physically and mentally
disabled (by birth, by accident or by war), those born with dwarfism, minorities
or those to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson
are "too weird to live". Pity changes to showing your own hypocrisy.
Even if these fictitious characters are miserable, at least they're trying to
live. The last image of the film is an extreme close-up of a woman's face.
You've seen her wander aimlessness. And the film actually makes you care for
her when something else would make her a freak to gawk at or to only pity with
a clear distance between you and her. There's no distance in Noisy Requiem.
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