Tales from the hatch – Weekend
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Imposter, a claustrophobic mono-thriller about a clerk who falls into a Tokyo sewer well, is released in Russian cinemas. Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s film tries to scare smartphone users and social media users, but fails to even get moviegoers interested.
On the evening before his own wedding to his boss’s daughter (apparently, the forthcoming marriage should be considered the crown and goal of his five-year efforts), a 30-year-old career retailer takes on his chest at a retirement party thrown by his colleagues, and in the middle of the bustling Shibuya metropolitan area manages to fall into an open manhole. At the bottom of the well, thank God, there is sand, but it is full of all sorts of rusty debris, and the clerk – or sarariman, as they call such well-groomed and with a briefcase in Japan – having come to his senses, discovers a lacerated wound on his leg and a rotten ladder, an attempt to climb which to where the moon looks into the hatch leads only to a second fall and the collapse of hopes for easy deliverance.
Along with this, the audience’s hopes are also crumbling in the foreseeable hour and a half to see someone, except for, albeit conditionally attractive, but still a single crippled man – well, centipedes and dead rats that keep him company in this hole. We’ve been swimming, we know: since 13 years ago Danny Boyle doomed James Franco, who was stuck in a crevice in 127 Hours, to similar torments, films about guys stuck, in Russian, in a deep ass, have gone sporadically, and the pandemic with its lockdown has only whipped up a wave of monofilms, in which even such a master prone to crowded compositions and noisy plots as Almodov was noted ar (“human voice”). Let’s say right away: the idol Yuto Nakajima who plays the sarariman is not James Franco and not Tilda Swinton. Having previously drummed in a boy band and acted in dramas, he is perhaps among the latest candidates whose acting benefit performance may be of little or no interest. The fact is that, unlike Korean dramas, where actors delicately and economically use their faces, Japanese TV series are shot in an emphatically handicraft, and frank tunes are preferred to all acting techniques. You can accept this style or not, but it is clearly not suitable for a mono-thriller with a claim to social satire. Nakajima goes out of his way, bulging eyes, grimacing and bursting into insane laughter: the last example of an arena game of the same degree of shamelessness that I personally could remember is the East Bengal (then this territory belonged to Pakistan, now there is Bangladesh) black-and-white melodrama of 1969 “Under the Blue Sky”, where the actress, playing a young lady who on the fly met her forehead with iron fence, the entire second series was indulged in such writhings of the demoniac that the on-screen relatives and the authors of the film preferred to transfer it into the hands of a psychiatrist. But if from a distance of time and with a discount for the provincial methods in the film of a country that has never aimed at cinematic superpowers, the behavior of a Bengal evoked laughter and curiosity, then in a film from Japan with its exquisite film traditions, this looks simply inappropriate.
Meanwhile, from some hole in the wall, presumably a sewer, yellowish foam begins to accumulate in a stone pit – and what does our hero do? Quite right, he is not an idiot, he takes out a smartphone and begins to actively use it. A smartphone is a convenient thing in life, but its appearance did a disservice to the cinema. It’s very uninteresting to stare at how, albeit pretty, a guy and a girl, each lying on their couch, send everything to each other – what’s the point of looking at other people’s monitors on the TV screen, when it’s much more useful just to use your own and chat with friends and relatives? Still gory in memory are the cases when smartphones ruined such detective franchises as the excellent Scream and Knives Out, which started well.
If we return to our Tokyo pit, then the smartphone monitor will somehow distract us from the idol’s monkey antics, however, the information that he will provide will confirm our assumptions: well, of course, the police called by him and the ex, whom he left five years ago for the sake of the boss’s daughter, will not find a single open hatch in Shibuya – and it doesn’t rain in Shibuya either, but gushing into the hatch so that the arriving foam also swells menacingly , – so, of course, there was phishing, something was screwed up with his GPS while he was drinking beer.
Then Sarariman logs in to the social network under the nickname Girl from the hatch and describes his situation – he only pretends to be a girl: everyone will rush to help the girls. The social network is starting to move such predictably vile characters, each of which embodies the most repulsive avatars of the #MeToo era, that, really, it would be better for both us and the clerk to stay in the company of centipedes and rat corpses. But then it turns out that the corpses in the well are not only rats: a human half-skeleton looms from the sand. It seems – and we also guessed about this – it is not the first time for a dead place to serve as a grave. So we are waiting for a maniac in a hood who knows how to reconfigure smartphones.
In addition to the intoxication of social networks and the manipulation of public opinion, “Imposter” chooses careerism, plastic surgery and, in general, all sorts of surgical manipulations of people with their God-given body as the objects of their criticism – a gentleman’s set of bugbears of anyone who undertakes to smash our era to smithereens. However, using a smartphone monitor and an amateur game of an arrogant celebrity as its only gadgets, the film itself turns out to be another burp of the era it criticizes, and far from the most vibrant and flowery.
Directed by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, there are not enough stars from the sky and for a quarter of a century he has been littering the cinema space alternately with thrillers about psychosexual deviant behavior (“Kichiku: A Banquet of Monsters”, “Antenna”), then invariably shot in the empty northern Hokkaido with meditative admiration of poor everyday life (“Hole in the Sky”, “End of Summer”). He achieved success by combining these two of his interests in 2013 into the stereoscopy of “My Man” – about the sexual harassment of a teenage girl to her stepfather (and, possibly, father) against the backdrop of a harsh sea coast: Gleb Panfilov, who headed the jury of the XXXVI Moscow Film Festival, gave this tape “Golden George” and the prize for best male role to the famous Tadanobu Asano, and in his homeland this the tape was received with a bang. Then Kumakiri again went into indistinct striping, and now he tried to return his luck, going from the opposite: again dividing his two main themes into two differently charged films shot almost simultaneously – a nervous claustrophobic thriller and a slow atmospheric road movie about agoraphobia. He was more fortunate with the second: Yoko’s 658 km journey about a hikikomori who was forced to leave home for the sake of her father’s funeral and was left in the middle of the highway without a smartphone and a penny of money became a triumph of the Shanghai festival. What a diametrically opposite film experience is, where the hero of all the riches of the world, on the contrary, has only one smartphone left – you now know.
In theaters from 10 August
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