Review of the film Kazuyoshi Kumakiri “Imposter”

At the box office – “Imposter” (#Manhole) by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, winner of the “Golden George” MIFF-2014 for the film “My Man”. Mikhail Trofimenkov listened to the gnashing of teeth of a Tokyo clerk falling into the sewers with little more than polite curiosity.

Alfred Hitchcock dreamed of making, but never made, a film that takes place in a telephone booth. Kumakiri immerses viewers for almost all of the hundred minutes of on-screen action, with the exception of the first and last few minutes, to the bottom of a sewer well. The thirty-year-old yuppie Shunsuke Kawamura, who had gone over at a bachelor party, collapsed there on the night before the wedding with the boss’s daughter, promising him considerable service prospects.

The disposition is clear in advance. In the fall, Kawamura injures his leg, which will have to be sewn up with a stapler, fortunately found in a careerist’s leather briefcase. The iron staircase leading to freedom is so rusted that an attempt to use it will result in new painful bruises. Streams of water are erupting into the hatch from the sky, and some kind of whitish slurry from a hole in the wall. Kawamura’s company consists only of woodlice the size of a good snake. And although the trouble happened in the seemingly busy Shibuya district of Tokyo, even at an odd hour, not a single night owl responds to the cries from the dungeon.

It’s good that the smartphone was not damaged in the fall and is not discharged. However, neither the police nor the girl abandoned by Kawamura, to whom he appeals in desperation, can not find a single open hatch in Shibuya. Yes, and there is cloudless weather. That is, the hero failed, the viewer makes a reasonable conclusion, not into a vulgar hatch, but into some other space.

Based on this, it is equally reasonable to assume that this is not a naturalistic drama about survival in extreme conditions, but something much more sublime.

For example, about a metaphysical parable about the futility of everything earthly, the unpredictability of being, and even about the relativity of the bodily nature of man. What could be better than sewerage for posing eternal questions: who am I, where am I, why is this all for me. Will Kawamura himself turn into one of the wood lice by the end, just as the hero of Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” turned into a cockroach? Why not. Moreover, Yuto Nakajima, who plays Kawamura, bulges his eyes so godlessly, grinds his teeth and jerks his limbs, which initially resembles some kind of huge insect.

Or, on the contrary, the film may turn out to be a cruel satire about the frailty of not human existence, but social life. He walked himself, walked such a victorious handsome man, and his leg suddenly cracked and in half. And now he is no longer the master of life, but a remnant with a trampled bouquet of flowers.

An element of satire will be found in The Imposter, but its edge is not directed at the hero, but at such a segment of society as the network community, on which only the lazy have not trampled, albeit rightly, in recent years. Desperate to get help from the police, who for some reason are trying to identify the poor fellow, and from an ex-girlfriend, Kawamura will go online under the nickname “girl in the hatch”: the girl, according to his calculations, is more likely to get help.

And, of course, a waterfall of idiotic comments will fall on him worse than the waterfall that falls into the hatch. And then the film becomes simply unbearable: replacing the action with screen-filling lines from network correspondence – this technique has become so hackneyed in world cinema in a matter of years that it is simply indecent to use it. Although, since we are talking about hieroglyphs, this graphomania looks quite decorative.

A metaphysical or satirical plot twist would be predictable, most likely boring, but logical and noble. But Kumakiri chooses a path that is not so predictable and even not boring, but not boring solely because of its inexorably increasing absurdity.

Networking is still beneficial. The hero realizes that he was not the victim of an accident, but of a conspiracy. Moreover, the most complicated conspiracy, with the substitution of GPS in his phone and dope mixed into his beer. At least a minister or a general is worthy of such a special operation, and not a mediocre clerk. And no details of the conspiracy in the final score will explain how Kawamura ended up where he ended up.

However, from a certain point on, the details are no longer important. From the moment a decayed and grinning corpse is discovered next to Kawamura, the picture, like on a roller coaster, will fly into the area of ​​​​a ridiculously savage thriller, if not a horror movie, to predictably end on the same sewer and cinema bottom.