Himizu (18) 129 mins ****
This is the film that confirms Japanese provocateur
Sion Sono (Love Exposure) as modern
cinema’s foremost speed-poet – a Godard of the East, perhaps. Sono was adapting
a popular manga – concerning a
teenager’s thwarted desire to live as peacefully as the humble himizu (“mole”) – when the 2011 tsunami
struck the Japanese mainland. Mobilising a rapid-response film crew, he’s
captured not only staggering images that exemplify our beaten-up, tumbledown
world, but what may become one of the great themes of our time: how the young
will bear the yoke of elders who’ve been wiped out – financially,
geographically, emotionally – by recent events. Sono retains his go-for-the-throat
approach, but the violence here somehow connects with the brutal economic
conditions, and he fosters very tender, affecting performances from Shota
Sometani and Fumi Nikaido as his crushed young lovers. Cinema, Carnage – and
Compassion – with a capital C.
Himizu is on selected release.
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