A hidden treasure from Japan

Sunday 17 June 2012

Who is Shinji Somai?

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Edinburgh international film festival retrospective 2 familiarity with little known Shinji Somai will prove rewarding by alan morrison

I'm sure I wasn't alone in asking this question when the Edinburgh International Film Festival announced the subject of its 2012 retrospective several months ago. Although I spent the better part of two decades as a film critic who championed world cinema and still rank his countryman Akira Kurosawa as my favourite director, this Japanese filmmaker is completely unknown to me. That's hardly surprising, however, given that the EIFF's 13-strong programme of Somai's entire works is his first full retrospective outside Japan.

This much I do know: Somai was born in 1948 and died in 2001, and was active between 1980 and 2000, a period in Japanese cinema that, for most in the west, is dominated by anime, Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike and not much else. And so to find out more, I set myself up a triple bill of Somai films selected from the beginning, middle and end of his career.From those middle years comes Moving (Ohikkoshi), (1993). It's a child's eye view of the breakdown of a marriage, as young Ren's parents separate and she goes through various stages of loneliness, rebellion and acceptance during the two-hour running time. Somai's sensitivity to the girl's feelings is obvious in the complex emotional arc he gives the character and, visually, the extended finale at a fire festival contains some wonderfully evocative images.Somai's final film was Kazahana (2000) which follows a disgraced and drunken bureaucrat and a female prostitute as they embark on a strange road trip into the snowy mountains. Again the director takes his characters through rough emotional terrain; when we discover why they've become the people they are, it's clear Somai has been teaching us not to judge people on first impressions. I also like how he uses flashbacks, particularly from the man's perspective, like a hungover brain piecing together the night before.Best of the three, however, is Typhoon Club (Taifu Kurabu) from 1985 – the same year as John Hughes's Breakfast Club. Here too are students stuck without adult supervision in their school and emerge from the experience as different people. But the forced stereotypes of the Hollywood film are nowhere in evidence, and the metaphor of the raging typhoon/hormonal storm is much more subtly done.Somai shows his skill in placing characters within the frame: body language is everything as girls hanging around turn boredom into an artform and boys pass a cigarette like a choreographed MGM routine. There's even an ecstatic scene as a group go singing and dancing in the rain, although much blacker moods swell to the surface elsewhere.Only three films into the retrospective, and I can tell Somai is a director with a profound body of work that will be worth exploring in detail. The Shinji Somai retrospective begins with PP Rider at Filmhouse, Thursday, 3.30pm

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A hidden treasure from Japan

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