A ‘World’ Worth Watching?
February 14, 2008
Japan’s ‘This World of Ours’ makes U.S. premiere at indie fest
There’s no Western equivalent of the Japanese concept of hikikomori. But in Japan, there supposedly exists a whole subculture of mostly young people who shut themselves off from the outside world for months or even years at a time. Here, such behavior would result in a Britney-esque psychiatric intervention. But if not considered completely socially acceptable in Japan, hikikomori is a recognizable aspect of the youth culture and is responsible for the 2007 film This World of Ours, which makes its U.S. premiere at this year’s San Francisco Independent Film Festival.
Ryo Nakajima, the film’s writer and director, was himself one of these shut-ins, but out of his experience came the idea for This World of Ours — a dark look at Japanese youth that seems equally inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and the events of 9/11.
Nakajima has a natural ability to lead the audience down one path, only to thwart expectations by changing course. This is evident from the film’s opening when we are introduced to Mitarai (Souta Hasegawa), a nerdy student who is constantly picked on by two bullies including Ryo (Satoshi Okutso). We expect Mitarai to be our protagonist as we’ve been programmed to think by countless Hollywood movies, but after Mitarai fights back and almost kills Ryo, the filmmaker’s sympathies shift to the bully, who starts to withdraw from school and life in general, leading to dangerous repercussions and an explosive finale.
Ryo’s story is intercut with that of two other characters: his attractive classmate Ami (Arisa Hata), a girl who encourages Ryo’s destructive choices, and Ami’s sometime boyfriend Hiroki (Yoshihiko Taniguchi), who, facing a bleak future, falls in with a group of thugs in committing a vicious crime that comes to haunt them all later.
Shot in stark digital video reminiscent of both the urgency of a documentary and the dreamlike buoyancy of a nightmare one can’t awaken from, This World of Ours paints a very dark portrait of contemporary youth culture. This is a world where murder, gang rape and terrorism are day-to-day realities. High School Musical this ain’t.
Yet, though the film presents these nihilistic characters in all their unedited glory, I can’t say that I felt the film itself was nihilistic in the same way that A Clockwork Orange is not nihilistic. I still can’t explain why; there is no character in this film that I found likeable in anyway. Nothing in the film offers any obvious hope that this negative situation will change. Yet the film did not leave me cold.
One possible reason might be Nakajima’s efforts to show us a bigger picture. Though it may not seem like it on the surface, This World of Ours is about the post-traumatic effects of 9/11. These characters aren’t New Yorkers or even Americans, yet the specter of 9/11 hangs over them just as profoundly, if not as obviously.
One character notes how even the enormity of 9/11 did nothing to really change things. If a tragedy of that scale doesn’t affect their lives in any meaningful way, what chance do they have to make a difference?
There’s something in this sentiment which Nakajima does not shy away from that elevates the film from simply a story about young rebels without a cause into something more ambitious: a sort of modern Grimm fable about the current state of the world.
This World of Ours (Oretachi No Sekai) screens on Feb. 10 at 9:30 p.m. at the Victoria Theater and Feb. 11 at 9:30 p.m. at the Roxie Cinemas. Other Asian films screening as part of the 10th annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival include Never Belongs to Me (Korea) and Tokyo Loop (Japan). For tickets or information: (415) 820-3907 or sfindie.com.
Philip W. Chung is a writer and co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble.
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A lovely “review.”
Wish I had written it.