Hirokazu Koreeda on why Monster, best screenplay winner at Cannes, isn’t just another Japanese movie to draw from Rashomon

Monster examines from various perspectives the intense friendship between two schoolboys and what it reveals about bullying, peer pressure and love

The director says he sees the story as both a celebration ‘of these boys and what they found’ and a statement about Japanese society’s twisted view of the world

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“Monster” examines an intense friendship between two boys at a Japanese school. Director Hirokazu Koreeda (above) talks about the meaning behind the film, and how elated with it he is. Photo: AFP

Published: 6:15pm, 20 Jun 2023

Any Japanese film – indeed, perhaps any film – that views events through multiple character perspectives inevitably draws comparison to Rashomon. Even now, Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film stands like a towering monument in world cinema.

But when Hirokazu Koreeda read the script for his new movie Monster, he didn’t let that bother him.

“Of course, that’s a film that I respect greatly,” he tells the Post, admitting that this three-part story owed a debt to Kurosawa. “I understood that straight away, but I wanted this not to be just about an interesting structure.”

Monster, for which he teamed up with writer Yuji Sakamoto, is Koreeda’s first feature since his 1995 debut, Maborosi, scripted by someone other than him.

In that time, Koreeda has become regarded as Japan’s premier auteur, if not quite on the level of Kurosawa, his delicate stories of human interactions, especially the family dynamic, finding favour with art house cinema audiences around the world.

Having won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, for his 2018 film Shoplifters, his most recent film, the drama Broker, set in Korea, won the festival’s best actor prize for its star Song Kang-ho in 2022. At Cannes in 2023, Sakamoto took home the best screenplay prize for his work on Monster.