Cloud

 

Cloud

Kuraudo ~ クラウド

Writer & Director ~ Kiyoshi Kurosawa

2024, Japan

Stars ~ Masaki Suda, Kotone Furukawa, Daiken Okudaira

 

Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is an online reseller, so much in his bubble that he’s unaware and uncaring of what effect his business has on buyers. He says he sells things before he even knows if they are fake. There are clues, sure, like dead animals left on his doorstep, but he’s indifferent. He works in a factory as a front, seemingly has a freewheeling girlfriend with whom he talks about an idyllic future, but reselling would seem to be his passion. They’re both ambitious and their dreams of living a more adorned, carefree life have the feel of adolescent lovers.

With no music or melodrama to prepare you, the straightforward, seemingly unfussed, precise presentation of the first half does not openly gesture where the second will go (although a poster does give it away). It feels like a character piece until it turns into a thriller. The film is interested in the direct line between online hate groups and lynch mobs, in the dislocation of online existence that can delude someone that there are no consequences for their actions; that they are not responsible and that a digital world gives them an immunity. What emerges is the portrait of customers so rightly aggrieved by internet scammers that their sense of impotence and outrage metastasises into something psychotic. For formerly apathetic Yoshii’s part, it’s a rude awakening and revelation of the full extent and repercussions of his sociopathy. (So, I don’t agree with PeterSobczynski that it devolves into “just another empty shoot-em-up.”) 

 Kurosawa is known for his disturbing slow-burners ‘Cure’, ‘Pulse’, ‘Creepy’, but there’s also the straight but disquieting drama ‘Tokyo Sonata’ to highlight how much he’s interested in human dynamics. ‘Cloud’ becomes a thriller in the same way that ‘A Brighter Summer’s Day’ also aligned with the gangster genre, or ‘Custody’ and ‘Parasite’ with horror tropes, or even ‘Burning’s hinting at the serial killer genre. None of these let the excursions into side-genres usurp the character drama, and even if ‘Cloud’ embraces its shoot-out in an abandoned factory set-piece, it never loses its perspective of a bewildered Yoshii finding himself in a full-throttle thriller scenario.

Yoshii remains an enigma until the very end; an ending that implies that he has been equally a mystery to himself. Yet it seems that those around him know exactly what he is – an opportunity, it ultimately appears. It’s certainly a narrative critical of the displacement and anger that the online world can induce, although with its end beats it makes clear that we are no less fooled and conned in the real world by ourselves and others.

‘Cloud’ makes for a vaguely elusive treatise on the modern condition, on fraud, on culpability and aggrievement, but under the guise of a direct if pensive shoot-out. It’s an off-kilter revenge thriller from one angle and a slightly opaque character study from another in a world of fraud and aggrievement. ‘Cloud’ hits both the enjoyment marks for fans of  slow-burn and of thriller cinema whilst shuffling your allegiances to who’s the good guys, if any. For Alex Papaioannou, it is a film “just so inherently angry and saddened by the state of humanity.” And that’s what makes it  fascinating beneath a deceptively patient veneer and its excellent final set piece.

 

Yojimbo & Sanjuro

Yojimbo

Yôjinbô

Director ~ Akira Kurosawa

Writers ~ Akira Kurosawa, Ryûzô Kikushima

1961, Japan

Stars ~ Toshirô Mifune, Eijirô Tôno, Tatsuya Nakadai

 

A seminal film of the anti-hero-playing-two-opposing-sides narrative. Here you have Kurosawa aping American Westerns and then in turn influencing American Westerns through the aping of Italian Sergio Leone’s.

 

A whole town built for this wandering Ronin to swagger into, and with the first thing he sees being a dog with a hand in its mouth, he senses an opportunity and the audience that Kurosawa means business. The town retreat being the tavern which becomes the locus for some brilliant/blatant exposition dispersal. The framing and blocking are exceptional throughout as well, underpinned by an almost jazz-funk score by Masaru Satô: on these merits alone, one can sit back and just soak in. Mifune scratches and schemes his way around town, playing both sides, sure of himself and yet that doesn’t stop him from biting a little more than he can slice up.

 

The lines between commerce-corruption-gangsterdom are all in clear sight with the locals barely a presence, keeping their heads down. The trade and gang war only leaves the coffin maker profiting, and even then, his boom only lasts as long as the conflict; pretty soon, he’ll be out of customers. Mifune’s samurai is an opportunist but like all decent anti-heroes, leans towards doing right.

 

Social commentary is all there, but mostly this is a fun anti-hero against bad guys. There’s little of the conscience to the fore of ‘Sanjuro’, although the bodyguard’s games here arguably cause more destruction, even if it inadvertently brings the chance of peacefulness for the town. Rather, there’s just a “See you around,” and moving on. 

 

Sanjuro

Tsubaki Sanjûrô

Director ~ Akira Kurosawa

Writers ~ Ryûzô Kikushima, Hideo Oguni, Akira Kurosawa

1962, Japan

Stars ~ Toshirô Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiju Kobayashi

 

Nominally a sequel to ‘Yojimbo’, Kurasawa having been convinced by the studio to do more with the character. Kurasawa converted Shûgorô Yamamoto’s novel “Hibi Heian” into a sequel centring Mifune’s shabby, scratching and scheming ronin. Set in mid-19th-century Japan, but it would seem to be a different era, and certainly, our protagonist is a little changed. Either it’s a prequel and he’s yet to give in to cynicism, or it’s a continuation and he’s learnt to be less mercenary. He’s not so much an anti-hero and more in the wrong place at the right time, saving a bunch of foolish young samurai from themselves. They’re embroiled in a local coup against their lord chamberlain, but naïve to who their real enemy is because they’re superficial enough to judge on looks.

 

The pleasure – aside from the brilliant framing and black-and-white vibrancy – is in watching Mifune embody someone who can barely restrain his super-warrior nature, however much he scratches and sloths around. One of the finest set-pieces is seeing him single-handedly dispatch twenty-plus adversaries in on swoop. It’s a showpiece highlight that, despite being exuberant and admirable in its execution, is undercut by Sanjuro being forced to do it. The scrabbling of the enemies allows a sliver of their individuality to show, so that they are not only enemies but victims. He berates the young samurais for causing him to slaughter everyone in the room. All the killings now come with conscience attached. The wife that they rescue tells Sanjuro that he is a sword always unsheathed, and this is what seems to unlock his self-reflection. It’s a similar trick with the finale: it’s a showstopper and then he speechifies to lament killing as a solution. The film has its cake and eats it.

 

But the most noticeable difference between ‘Sanjuro’ and its predecessor is the sweep of humour. Not so broad or light that it overwhelms the drama, but just another texture. Mostly this is at the expense of the nine young samurais, but even then, the film doesn’t condescend or make them outright comic, but merely as foolhardy from naïveté (my favourite is the centipede line). 

 

There’s a lot of commentator feedback that ‘Sanjuro’ is more enjoyable then ‘Yojimbo’, perhaps because its humour, plot and ethics are more evident, but they are both equally great chambara  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samurai_cinema  and filmmaking. And when adding ‘The Seven Samurai’, the influence of Kurosawa on the American Western – which he was inspired by in the first place, and influential not least from the impact on Sergio Leone’s ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ and its own knock-on effect – cannot be underestimated.