KIMURA YOSHINO
Japanese
tarento often have meteoric careers, especially female ones. They're frequently debuted as teens, and as the cuteness wears off, often so to does their lustre.
But actress Kimura Yoshino is still going strong, and going through her movies that I've seen makes for an interesting cross-section.
I first saw her in the TV drama
Love Complex in 2000 (not to be confused with the utterly dissimilar
Lovely Complex). This was flatly the best piece of Japanese TV I've ever seen. It opens as seemingly an office comedy, maybe a bit more stylish than most and with surreal touches, but by the end becomes strange and dark, with the initially comically egotistical room-chief revealed as a demon that can manifest in the minds of the others and urge them to suicide.
Kimura's character is "The Queen," the leader of the executive secretaries and his main rival. The character is frosty, controlled, preternaturally competent and the emotional confidante of the other women. The room-chief's assistant discovers, however, that her idolized father suicided a year earlier, and the e-mails she receives from him are ones she sends herself to maintain an elaborate self-deception. This mirrors his own issues with his hell-mother and sets him against the room-chief when he uses it to demolish Kimura's character. It's a really nice performance from her, both in the early stage of Queen, the later of emotional walking dead and the endgame leading up to a final image of her emotional rebirth.
A couple years ago I ordered a subtitled version because this is a series I've wanted to share with others. Sadly, the subs go beyond cracked to shattered. Character names are translated like regular words, inconsistently so between eps. The dialogue has bizarre inaccuracies and ungrammaticisms that make sense neither from an English nor Japanese perspective; I suspect it was robo-translation done by Chinese. Even the great credit sequence is gone from YouTube, leaving only someone's upload of a quick bed scene and calling the whole a "lesbian drama." That strikes me as something like calling
Titanic a movie about corsets: not inaccurate, but hardly complete.
The same year, Kimura appeared in a horror movie called
Isola. I saw most of this one some ten years back, and memory is a bit fuzzy. Tokyo Swan thought it not bad but pretty derivative, and having seen more J-horror since, he's probably right.
It's an intriguing concept. Kimura plays a rescue volunteer in Kobe following the Great Hanshin Quake. She meets a schoolgirl with multiple personalities, coming to suspect that one of these is actually a demonic possession using the girl as a hiding place. It really is the actress playing the schoolgirl that was most memorable. Asked if she can describe an earlier incident she answers something like, "Well, Momo-chan saw it, but she's only two and can't talk; Tomoya saw it, but he's an uncooperative boy and won't tell you about it, . . . ." Pressed on whether there's someone "different" in there, her face suddenly changes as she says, "Knock off the act; if you want to talk to
me, then do so."
Doesn't seem to be a trailer up, just a video called "The Thirteenth Personality" that uses the film's imagery. I'd watch this one again, given an opportunity:
Kimura does a lot of work in TV dramas, and last I lived in Japan did a lot of guesting on variety shows and TV commercials, the real bread and butter of being a
tarento. She had bit parts in Kitano's
Glory to the Filmmaker! and with Matsuda Ryuuhei in
Suicide Song, but the next meaty feature role I've seen her in (just last night) was
Sakuran (2006).
The title means "derangement" (with probably an off-center pun on cherry blossoms), and it's the story of a girl sold to an Edo-era brothel (not geisha house, these ladies have their obi knotted in front so they can (un)tie them themselves). The protagonist is played as an adult by Tsuchiya Anna, and a number of familiar Japanese actresses appear (Kimura plays the house's star courtesan, the expensive one who parades through the street to advertise the house). Interestingly, the director is also a woman, Ninagawa Mika. I believe this is the first woman-directed Japanese film I've seen.
The visual style of this movie is gorgeous. Yoshiwara districts were already flamboyant places, and here they take every brightly colored magic marker in the box to it. The soundtrack is also interesting. Hollywood movies set in Japan tend to use very Japanesey music that my wife finds irritating. Such an idea wouldn't occur to them, of course. A similar period drama called
O-oku had very Germanic sounding music as that era was one of Westernization.
Sakuran uses a very modern sound mixing J-pop, jazz and rock influences (I found from Schilling's review that Shiina Ringo did it; she's another J-pop artist I quite like). The first time it really caught my ear was when Tsuchiya's character is promoted and does her first publicity walk to a very rock sound. For a moment I went, "Eh?" but then it was obvious. Johnny Depp said of
Pirates of the Caribbean that pirates were the rock stars of their day. Of course that's silly (try Mexican drug lords of their day), but these elite working girls
were the cover girls of their day, and it really made that connection nicely.
Schilling raves about the movie and gives it five stars. I don't quite go that far, but enjoyed it a lot and would recommend it. Possibly the comparison with
Memoirs of a Geisha had something to do with that, as he draws a lot of comparisons. Never saw
Memoirs and probably should one day, but Japanese reactions to it ran from puzzled stares to belly laughs, so it's not high on my list.
One problem might be that the theme is a restricted one. The women are literally prisoners, and the range of things you can do is limited. Kimura's character, for instance, is the classic top dog starting to show her age and resentful of a rising star. The movie puts some twists on that and she plays it well, but I suppose that's what kept me from loving the film quite as much as Schilling did, though I have no hesitation in recommending it:
Next one I've seen was
Zen-Zen Daijoubu ("Fine, Totally Fine") (2008). Kimura plays a very different character here: a nebbishy, klutzy woman so shy that she tries to make a human connection by watching homeless people through binoculars, but combined with artistic ability and a deep empathy. In an early sequence she recognizes the hand gesture a mute woman makes means she wants a roll of heavy tape for her junk sculpture, not a doughnut as her friend thinks, and later she sneaks in and leaves some.
The story picks up when a guy gives her a job in a hospital because she's so bedraggled that he takes pity on her. That doesn't work out, so he gets her a job in the used book store run by his father and brother. The two brothers begin to find themselves competing for her attention, but a customer who restores traditional pottery also notices that there's more to her than immediately meets the eye. Meanwhile, the dad sets out on a road trip, singing songs about the wonders of white rice.
It's an odd little movie but a good one. A comedian named Arakawa Yoshiyoshi plays one of the brothers. He's a sort of stubby guy who's perfect for the role of a kid who can't quite grow up and doesn't really want to (he was also prominent in
Survive Style 5+. One aspect of Kimura's character is that she listens to rain on tape. The feeling of watching the movie is sort of similar: gentle and unassuming but satisfying. Throw in some nicely comic characters and moments and there's much to like:
In 2009 came
Killer Virgin Road. I didn't get that title until reading Schilling's review, "Virign Road" being Japlish for a bride walking down the aisle, and it's called
Killer Bride's Perfect Crime in English. It stars Ueno Juuri as Numajiri Hiroko, a 25-y-o who was always taunted as "Donjiri Biriko," (tail-end last-in-line girl) as a child. She's finally won out, first in her office to quit to get married, and to a real catch. But then she accidentally kills her landlord in the act of his stealing her panties. Because her grandfather has said that he can die happily only after seeing her in her wedding dress she decides to hide the body until after the ceremony (or, well, maybe after the honeymoon in Hawai'i).
Driving in the woods with the body in a suitcase, the branch from which Kimura's character (Kobayashi) is trying to hang herself snaps and she lands in the car. She's an older woman who has always been such a perfect girlfriend that men won't ruin that by marrying her. Unfortunately her stars won't permit her to kill herself no matter how elaborately she tries. Kobayashi proposes a deal. She'll use her suicide-ninja skills to hide the body if Hiroko will then kill her, if not she'll go straight to the police.
It'd be pithy to say that I don't like this movie but that I like Kimura in it, but that's too glib. As a lightweight, wild comedy, girl-buddy movie it's not at all bad. I was thinking that director Kishitani Goro had come from a background in making TV commercials, but on checking he seems to have been an actor. However, several recent directors (like Nakashima Tetsuya, of whom more anon) did come from such a background. His movies use CM-inspired techniques of rapid edits, fantastic CGI and weird situations very effectively. He uses them to make intriguing transitions, innovatively present backstory or establish tone. But he knows when to shut that off and let his actors take over a scene to really deepen their characters and move the story. Kishitani comes up with some really clever bits (I like a recurring element of things turning into game graphics) but doesn't know when to put those toys away.
It's ironic that the very first image is a collection of Rika-chan dolls (Japan's answer to Barbie). By putting his actors through such wild contortions Kishitani makes them a bit plastic. Kimura is the only one who, for me at least, still managed to imbue her performance with something a bit deeper. Perhaps a wild comedy doesn't really need anything more than that, but
Killer does have an emotional dimension (including resolutions for surprisingly minor characters) that don't have the impact they might because of this. Nakashima pulls this off far better in both of his I've seen,
Shimotsuma Monogatari and
Memories of Matsuko.
But
Killer is a fun movie and worth it for what it is. You can catch it for free on hulu even:
Which brings us to the only movie on this list I haven't seen, but really wish to.
Kokuhaku ("Confession") is Nakashima's 2010 film about a schoolteacher and single mother (played by Matsu Takako, an actress with a similar career arc to Kimura's) whose daughter is killed. Rejecting the police conclusion that the death was accidental, she blames two boys in her class and orchestrates the others in taking revenge on them (while I've never seen it, discussions of the
ijime problem suggest that Japanese teachers do sometimes do similar things).
Kimura plays the over-protective mother of one of these boys (sigh, all my Japanese idol actresses are playing moms these days). I've tried to avoid too detailed rundowns of the film to avoid spoilers, but it's said that Nakashima deftly leads you down the road of sympathizing for one side in all this and then steering you back toward the other, such that it's always a bit more emotionally murky than a simple 'venge fantasy.
With his TV commercial background it's no surprise he does
visuals and action so well, but Nakashima's grasp of plotting and characterization is also strong. Both of his films I've seen are comedies (though
Matsuko certainly counts as a dark one), and I'm very curious about how he handles this more serious story. It's also a Kimura performance I'm really looking forward to seeing:
Heh heh . . . just for greens, here's one of Kimura's Mitsui Sumitomo ads that was running last I lived in the House of the Rising Sun:
And a Suntory one I'd never seen:
Edit:
I should translate the subs:
"Your foot."
"Your butt."
"Gonna smack you!"