Pale imitation of a great original
MISTY Starring Yuki Amami, Takeshi Kaneshiro. Directed by Kenki Saegusa. In Japanese with English and Chinese subtitles. Category 2B. Showing at Broadway Cinematheque.
The Japanese film industry is in such dire straits it will seemingly try anything to revive its fortunes at the home box office. But, by any standards, the decision to remake Akira Kurosawa's seminal 1950 drama Rashomon in the style of a popular teen 'trendy' drama is strange.
Kurosawa's classic is one of his deepest works, philosophising on the relativity of truth. It also features a grisly rape and murder. In spite of Japan's greater tolerance for violence and sexual violence on screen, this is hardly the material for a glossy romantic tale, which, unfortunately, Misty tries to be.
Director Kenki Saegusa, who has previously made a name for himself in TV, has stripped all of the philosophical import from the film, instead trying to turn it into a story of cartoon-like passions. Worse, the whole thing is photographed in chocolate-box style more worthy of, well, a light teen romance than a story of violent emotions.
First, a little bit about the original (I'm not certain Misty would be that clear to those who haven't seen it). In Rashomon four people - a woodcutter, a wife, a husband, and a bandit - tell their version of a rape and murder committed in a forest. Each tells a version of the truth that shows him or her in as good a light as possible.
The woodcutter relates how he found the body of the husband and that of the wife. In the second story the bandit, who admits to having raped the wife, says he killed the husband in a duel over her honour. The wife says it was she who killed the husband in a fit of emotion after he said she was now worthless.
The fourth version is the story of the dead husband, told through a medium: he says the wife made overtures to the bandit and he committed suicide out of shame. The fifth version sees the woodcutter revise his story: he admits to having seen the whole thing and says the woman could not choose between the bandit and the husband, and got them to fight over her.