On May 10, 1932, the Japanese media erupted with news regarding a recent tragedy at Mount Sakata in Kanagawa Prefecture. The bodies of Keio University student Goro Chosho and his girlfriend Yaeko Yuyama had been discovered on the slopes, the former clad in his school uniform, the latter wrapped in a kimono. As subsequent investigations determined, the couple had been forbidden to marry by Yuyama’s upperclass parents, and so they climbed the mountain, lay down next to one another facing the sea, and poisoned themselves.¹ Capitalizing on the two having met at a Christian fellowship, Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun ran a headline describing Chosho and Yuyama’s relationship as “A Love That Reached Heaven.”² Resultant sensationalism and interest in their suicide spawned imitative effects throughout Japanese society—indicative of the public’s relation to the media at the time.

As historian Peter High notes in his book The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945: “Japanese social historians tend to sketch out the course of 1930s cultural history along a time line of consecutively occurring incidents and fads.”³ Granted, the impulse to emulate tragedy had been prevalent long before. In May 1903, eighteen-year-old philosophy major Misao Fujimura became a celebrity when he jumped from Kegon Falls after carving his farewell poem into a nearby tree. Over the next four years, more than a hundred and eighty people, inspired by news portraits of Fujimura as a martyr, attempted to kill themselves at the falls.⁴ Imitation of publicized suicides—especially those involving spiritual or erotic overtones—remained fervent in 1932, as demonstrated in what became known as “The Lovers’ Suicide Rage.” Within seven months of Chosho and Yuyama’s passing, over twenty couples traversed to Mount Sakata to end their lives.⁵

Concurrent with the copycat suicides was a surge in exploitative entertainment: radio dramas and stageplays about Chosho and Yuyama, romantic ballads released as bestselling records. Sure enough, the motion picture industry joined in on the craze. Yasujiro Ozu’s Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? (1932) referenced the death toll through a jab of sardonic comedy: a young business executive, stuck escorting a woman his peers hope he’ll marry, suggests they go to Mount Sakata for a date. But perhaps most infamous was a feature-length dramatization of the original incident produced by Shochiku. Titled after the earlier mentioned Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun headline, Heinosuke Gosho’s A Love That Reached Heaven premiered on June 10, 1932—exactly one month after the news stories first broke.⁶

While the picture’s now lost and information remains scant (Arthur Nolletti, Jr.’s sizable book on Gosho merely acknowledges it via two brief sentences), A Love That Reached Heaven became one of that year’s biggest releases, recuperating its five thousand-yen budget⁷ and then some. (Its popularity might’ve also stemmed from casting, as leads Ryoichi Takeuchi and Hiroko Kawasaki had been in the public eye before. Takeuchi became a tabloid favorite in 1927 for walking off a set with actress Yoshiko Okada.⁸ And in 1931’s Women Are in Every World, Kawasaki performed with Ichiro Yuki what’s believed to have been the first kiss in a Japanese motion picture; filmed when Japanese censorship strictly forbade love scenes, the kiss slipped into distribution only because Yuki distracted the censor in the screening room, the film subsequently withdrawn after a police officer spotted the scene during a theater patrol.)⁹

Widespread interest in Shochiku’s film spawned additional copycat suicides. Theater owners learned of moviegoers smuggling poison into the auditorium, and thus dispatched usherettes to monitor screenings for attendees attempting to take their lives during the drama. Sadly, “The Lovers’ Suicide Rage” worsened from here. In January 1933, two schoolgirls leaped into the stratovolcano Mount Mihara on Izu-Oshima Island, the news triggering a second wave of suicides that lasted until March—by which time approximately 944 people had perished in the caldera. The media remained quick to sensationalize. Responding to macabre public speculation, Yomiuri Shinbun newspaper lowered a gondola into the volcano to determine whether the victims had crashed onto the rocks or plunged straight into the magma.¹⁰

Meantime, Izu-Oshima’s local commerce boomed: stables increased their stock of horses, local schools started pilgrimage trips to Mount Mihara, and Tokyo steamship companies met the travel demand of anxious tourists by scheduling additional commutes to the island.¹¹ By the time the rage finally subsided in spring 1933, one thing had been proven: the media and society together remained ravenous in their capitalizing on calamity. As Peter High writes in his book, what started as the personal tragedy of two people “was dramatically reworked, first by the press […] into a mass hysteria phenomenon of almost majestic proportions.”¹²

Works cited and further reading:

1. Di Marco, Francesca. “Act or Disease? The Making of Modern Suicide in Early Twentieth-century Japan.” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 2013), p. 347
2. High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’ War, 1931-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, p. 28 (Disclaimer: I should note that High’s book claims the couple died by jumping into the mountain’s volcanic crater; but, when cross-referenced with other sources, this doesn’t appear to be the case.)
3. Ibid, p. 27
4. Di Marco, p. 336
5. Ibid, p. 348
6. Di Marco, p. 348
7. Haukamp, Iris. A Foreigner’s Cinematic Dream of Japan: Representational Politics and Shadows of War in the Japanese-German Coproduction New Earth (1937). London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020 (Ebook)
8. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008, pp. 95-6
9. Hirano Kyoko. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation, 1945-1952. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992, p. 154
10. High, pp. 28-9
11. Yoda Hiroko. “Spooky Izu: Tales of sorcerers and suicide on Izu Oshima.” CNN. 29 October 2009
12. High, p. 27

Monster by Hirokazu Kore-eda

Prolific Japanese humanist filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda returns to Cannes after last year’s middling Broker. At a glance, Monster is an aesthetic departure. The film opens with a building engulfed in smouldering flame and moves forward with uncharacteristic darkness. Following an increasingly distraught mother’s investigation into her son’s erratic behaviour, Kore-eda plunges into nightscapes roamed by haunted youths. Narratively, the movie trisects into three acts, each shifting character perspectives to re-visit earlier moments through new eyes. The plot-twist riddled mystery structure reveals its early passages as red herrings adjacent to the emotionally simplistic story it settles into. The film’s narrative trickery reads disingenuous to its stabs at sincerity. Even Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piano accompaniment—a tender final score from the late maestro—is squandered by the film’s tendency towards histrionics.

Kore-eda leaves nothing to interpretation. Monster hyper-rationalizes every character decision, robbing each individual’s psychology of any mystery. Even the source of textural details (e.g. a haunting blare of horns echoing diegetically in the distance of a pivotal scene) finds narrative contextualization later. Still, Kore-eda includes a handful of moving shots: namely a lingering composition where two characters slam fists against a mud-coated window, struggling to shatter the glass as rainfall accelerates, growing so heavy it drowns out the visibility of their hands. It’s enough to wish Kore-eda’s filmmaking embraced a visceral film language more often. [2.5/5]

The Sweet East by Sean Price Williams

Sean Price Williams, whose cinematography defined a pervading aesthetic of 2010s American indie cinema, makes his debut feature with The Sweet East: an episodic nightmare comedy across state lines and into an all-American underbelly. The film follows Lillian, a runaway teenager drifting through a series of misadventures, encountering a million shades of American eccentricity and exploitative men at every turn. Lillian herself is an enigma, her own identity gradually sculpted through imprints of the characters she encounters. The Sweet East finds Williams’ gritty aesthetic imbued with flashes of absurdity (e.g., an opening music number, moments of fantastical artifice, silent-film intertitle chapter headings, etc.). Yet while his images are textured and strikingly-composed, Williams’ storytelling is largely sophomoric.

The film’s a self-consciously blunt satire of everything under the American flag; it opens with a pledge of allegiance recorded over motorcycle stunt footage and only grows less subtle. The film begins like arthouse All Gas No Brakes or a Harmony Korine movie if he settled for toothless irony. Soon enough, Sweet East becomes a thirty-minute Lolita adaptation, down to its Humbert Humbert-figure (Simon Rex as a slimeball neo-Nazi academic predator) reciting Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Scripted by film critic Nick Pinkerton, the movie’s humour seems plucked from a milieu of nihilistic, early Trump-era Twitter memes. The film begins with a Pizzagate gag and stays beholden to the humour of this outdated zeitgeist. Ultimately, Sweet East operates on satire but reveals no true ideology. The movie is shapelessly ironic, nothing more than an articulation of doom. It’s apocalyptic fury distorted into grand apathy. [2/5]

Youth (Spring) by Wang Bing

Assembled over five years, Chinese documentarian Wang Bing’s latest film Youth (Spring) charts the lives (work lives, personal lives) of several teenage or twenty-something textile workers in Zhili, China. Their worlds consist of long hours toiling with fabric and collective bargaining with employers over unliveable payrates, all the while navigating the joys and hardships of youth. As a documentarian, Wang’s access into his subjects’ worlds is startlingly thorough. He films in domestic quarters, cramped workshops, and the streets of Zhili. Youth unfolds against industrial backdrops overrun with garbage. Wang cultivates an aesthetics of refuse: the waste which floods the streets, accumulates in the subjects’ dormitories, or remains on the workshop floor after a day of textile labour.

An invaluable documentation of Chinese labour politics, Youth centers the workers themselves as more than mere tools in the chain of production. Much of the movie unfolds as durational shots of workers working: hands operating sewing machines with aggressive familiarity. Wang is a silent observer (though he’s occasionally acknowledged by subjects). He organizes the movie around the rhythms and repetitions of his subjects’ lives, rather than narrative practicality or any didactic thesis. The film’s length and slowness paint an immersive portrait of a working-class day-to-day: a film form aligned with its subjects’ reality. [4/5]

The Delinquents by Rodrigo Moreno

The latest from Argentine filmmaker Rodrigo Moreno is a laidback, three-hour crime-comedy about two middle-aged bankers crushed by the tedium of their daily lives and the impossibility of escape. One devises a plan. He robs a sizeable amount from the bank vault. Before surrendering to authorities, he leaves the stolen fortune with his co-worker to guard for his three-and-a-half-year prison sentence. The film parallels the aesthetics of a bank vault with the interior of a prison compound, establishing a world where wage labour is indistinguishable from carceral life.

Moreno highlights his characters’ ennui, charging his low-stakes drama with an everyday desperation. The spoils of the characters’ crime are modest. The small sum is an appeal to an earned dignity unachievable in their work life. The Delinquents moves forward with ease, its careful framing unafraid to omit its subjects. There are some missteps—namely a late-film flashback sequence which complicates the minimalist storytelling—but Moreno displays tremendous control of the characters and their suffocating environments. [3.5/5]

About Dry Grasses by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Here’s another Chekhovian drama set against forlorn wintery landscapes from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. As usual, it’s a saga of arrogance and petty insecurities. About Dry Grasses follows a schoolteacher in remote Anatolia as he gradually succumbs to a miserablist worldview. The film finds its footing late: a half-hour dialogue between two characters which evolves from cordial to combative to melancholically sexual is among Ceylan’s best work. Otherwise, this lacks the intimacy of Ceylan’s smaller canvas movies (e.g. Distant) and the sweeping drama of his other epics (e.g. Winter Sleep). About Dry Grasses often feels like a rehash, too comfortable with itself for the story’s aching isolation to resonate. [2.5/5]

Eureka by Lisandro Alonso

Eureka, the long-awaited follow-up to Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja, is the filmmaker’s most ambitious project to-date. A free-flowing narrative, the story begins as a bullet-frenzied, classic western on a TV screen, moves into a modern-day South Dakota indigenous reservation, then glides to the jungles of 1970s Brazil. Alonso’s camera dissolves borders of space and time, establishing its own fluid continuity. Usually, the turns in Alonso’s movies are understated: vague ripples in an otherwise minimalist work. In Eureka, the shifts are abrasive and unmissable. Still, despite the magnitude of its zig-zags, the narrative flow isn’t quite as radical as you’d hope from a unique filmmaker like Alonso (especially after the similar narrative movements in Lois Patiño’s Samsara). The gestures feel vaguely hollow.

Nonetheless, individual moments in Eureka are vivid and beautiful. Alonso’s imagining of the Old West as a lawless Sodom, complete with boozehound nuns, is as imaginative as anything he’s made. The sequence’s irresistibility makes its role in the larger film all the more complex; Alonso situates Old West mythology in opposition to indigenous histories and realities. Curiously, Eureka is most energized trafficking in its own subversive séance of Old West debauchery. [3.5/5]