Читать книгу A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors - Alexander Jacoby - Страница 31

(b. January 1, 1954)

廣木隆一

Of the directors who have graduated from “pink film” to the mainstream, Hiroki has remained perhaps the most faithful to his origins: he continues to make films on sexual themes, though titillation has given was to analysis. In the eighties, after serving as assistant to prolific “pink” director Genji Nakamura, he made pornographic films for both straight and gay audiences; likewise, his first mainstream feature, 800 Two Lap Runners (1994), explored both hetero- and homosexual feeling in its account of the awkward relationship between a teenage runner and the former girlfriend of the dead trackmate with whom he once had a sexual experience.

Hiroki’s next film, Midori (Monogatari kara ashibyōshi yori: Midori, 1996), was another drama about adolescent emotions, focusing on a disaffected high school girl who feigns illness to spend time with her boyfriend. Female protagonists continued to be central to Hiroki’s most interesting work, which dealt with young adults and with their sexual conduct in the fragmented society of modern urban Japan. Tokyo Trash Baby (Tōkyō gomi onna, 2000), Vibrator (Vaiburēta, 2003), and Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World (Gārufurendo, 2004) were all moving, understated films about lonely, alienated women seeking solace in romantic fantasy and transient attachments. The heroine of Tokyo Trash Baby, obsessed with her neighbor, rifles through his garbage for mementos of his life; this rubbish, and the well-stocked but soulless convenience store where Vibrator begins, seemed metaphors for today’s prosperous yet rootless society, in which consumer goods fail to satisfy emotional needs. Hiroki shot these films on digital video, and his informal style, with its loose compositions and low-key performances, effectively dramatized the haphazard lives of his protagonists, insecure both in work and relationships. Darker and more melodramatic in plot was L’Amant (2004), a coolly observed account of a teenage schoolgirl who sells herself for a year as a sex slave to three brothers. By refusing to pass judgment on the perverse actions it depicted, Hiroki’s detached style forced the viewer to confront his own taboos. The director again explored the extremes of sexual behavior in M (2006); described by Jasper Sharp as “a Belle de Jour for the internet age,” it charted the experiences of a housewife who begins to work as a prostitute after receiving an email from a dating website.

Beside these troubling and emotionally complex films, The Silent Big Man (Kikansha-sensei, 2004) was an unexpectedly chaste, academic work, set safely in the past, and prettily photographed against the scenic backdrops of the Inland Sea. Recalling Keisuke Kinoshita in its story of a mute teacher assigned to an island school, it lacked Kinoshita’s skill for melodrama, and though Hiroki’s dry style restrained its sentimentality somewhat, he seemed ill suited to the material. Happily, with It’s Only Talk (Yawarakai seikatsu, 2005), a subtly compelling chronicle of the life of an unemployed thirty-something woman suffering from manic depression, Hiroki returned to his more fruitful preoccupation with the problems of contemporary urban life. Here his use of locations in Tokyo’s down-at-heel Kamata district was especially well judged, anchoring the drama in a near-documentary record of a specific place. Love on Sunday (Koi suru nichiyōbi, 2006), meanwhile, revisited the territory of the director’s earliest mainstream features, exploring adolescent emotions as it charted a teenage girl’s last 24 hours in her country home. In his recent work, Hiroki has proved himself one of the modern Japanese cinema’s most intelligent students of character, as well as one of the most precise analysts of Tokyo’s twenty-first-century zeitgeist and Japan’s twenty-first-century malaise.

1982 Seigyaku! Onna o abaku / Sexual Abuse! Exposed Woman / Urban Style

1983 Kimata Saburō-kun no koto: Bokura no jidai / Our Generation

Bokura no kisetsu / Our Season

1984 Nishikawa Serina: Nozokibeya no onna / Serina Nishikawa: A Woman Peeps into the Room

Hakuchū joshi kōsei o okasu / Raping a High School Girl in Broad Daylight

Chikan to sukāto / Pervert and Skirt

Sensei, watashi no karada ni hi o tsukenaide / Teacher, Don’t Turn Me On

Mitsu ni nureru onna / Woman with Wet Juice

1985 Yarinko Chie: Ichijiku shinsatsudai / Chie the Tart: Couch of Figs

Bokura no shunkan / Our Moment

1986 Hakui chōkyō / Training in a White Coat

Kindan: Ikenie no onna / Forbidden: Sacrificed Woman

SM kyōshitsu: Shikkin / SM Classroom: Toilet in the Wrong Place

Tōsatsu mania: Furaidē no onna / Secret Filming Mania: Friday’s Woman

Hatsujō musume: Guriguri asobi / Girl in Heat: Rubbing Play

Romanko kurabu: Ecchi ga ippai / Club Romanko: Highly Sexed

1987 Kobayashi Hitomi no honshō / The True Self of Hitomi Kobayashi

1988 Kikuchi Eri: Kyonyūzeme / Eri Kikuchi: Huge Breasts

Seijuku onna / Holy Mature Woman

1989 Dōtei monogatari 4: Boku mo sukī ni tsuretette / Story of a Male Virgin: Take Me Skiing Too

1990 Sawako no koi: Jōzuna uso no ren’ai kōza / A Love Affair with Sawako (lit. Sawako’s Love: Lecture on Convincing Lies in Love)

1991 Ji go ro: Āban naito sutōrī / Gigolo: Urban Night Story

1993 Maōgai: Sadisuchikku shitī / Sadistic City (video)

1994 Muma / Evil Dream

800 Two Lap Runners

1995 Kimi to itsu made mo / Forever with You

Gerende ga tokeru hodo koi shitai / I Want to Make Love Until the Ski Slopes Melt

1996 “Monogatari kara ashibyōshi” yori: Midori / Midori

1999 Tenshi no misuterareta yoru / The Night the Angel Turned Away

2000 Futei no kisetsu / I Am an S and M Writer (lit. Season of Adultery)

Tōkyō gomi onna / Tokyo Trash Baby

2001 Bikyaku meiro / Labyrinth of Leg Fetishism

2002 Rihatsu tenshu no kanashimi / The Barber’s Sadness

2003 Deka matsuri / Cop Festival (co-director)

Vaiburēta / Vibrator

2004 Kikansha-sensei / The Silent Big Man (lit. Mr. Locomotive)

Gārufurendo / Girlfriend: Someone Please Stop the World

L’Amant

2005 Female (co-director)

Yawarakai seikatsu / It’s Only Talk

2006 Koi suru nichiyōbi / Love on Sunday

Yokan / Premonition (short)

M

2007 Koi suru nichiyōbi: Watashi: Koi shita / Love on Sunday: I Did Love