Explosive Confessions

Nearly caught a cold tonight from walking home from the IFC Palace cinema with nothing more substantial on my back than a simple shirt! Lucky that I could warm myself up with some quick breathing exercises. But the risk was well worth taking. Saw an excellent Japanese movie called Kokuhaku(Confessions) by Tetsuya Nakashima, based on a novel of the same name by Kane Minato. I've never seen any films in the cinema since the HKIFF last Easter. So it was a wonderful feeling to sit in a comfortable seat in front of a wide screen again.

The story opens with some teenage students all drinking milk and then replacing the used paper cartons into designated slots in the wall after they are done and then a teacher X recounting why she would be leaving the F1 class in a month's time and be replaced by another teacher Y. She says that her young daughter D had just been found dead in a swimming pool next to the school. She said she suspected that it might have been done by two of her students which she would for the sake of protecting their privacy just refer to as A and B but the students do not appear to be paying much attention as she went into the history of how she met her husband, Z, a celebrity teacher who wrote a book on how to care for students, and who had HIV, how because of his condition, she chose not to formalize their marriage out of fear that their daughter might be asked embarrassing questions about why she did not have a father, the characteristics of who she suspected and why. She did emphasize one point though: how precious life is. She was completely calm when she related the story of her resignation, almost as if she were talking about some one else. I suppose that it is deliberate. The director probably wanted the movie to have an eery "objectivity" so that the teacher's monotone voice will hide both the emotional dynamite hidden in her story and her desire for meticulously planned psychological revenge against the perpetrators of the crime, who are protected against criminal prosecution because of the legal fiction that children below the age of 14 cannot have the capacity to commit a crime. The clinical objectivity was emphasized by the almost static camera and the bluish monochrome quality of the picture. The camera hardly moved, always staying at a comfortable medium distance from the characters except for a few close ups of particular parts of the human torso or face, thus creating an atmosphere of apparent realism and thus greater tension. At the end of the tale, she told A and B that she had already infected their milk with the HIV blood of her husband!

As the story unfolded, we got successive monologues by individual characters including A and B and also another girl student C, the prefect of the class, who was asked by the new teacher Y, an admirer of the Z, to visit B, who threw X's daughter into the swimming pool to drown her after he realized that she was not yet dead, out of a desire to outdo the clever boy A who thought he succeeded but didn't so that in B' s own mind, he could finish off what the clever boy A did not. B subsequently developed a depression so serious that he refused to budge from his bedroom and would turn violent whenever his mother souhgt to enter it. His mother, another single parent, would do anything to bring back his deranged son to normality but could never bring herself to accept that his son could have been a murderer who acted out of his own free will. It was by accident that A  saw D pestering her mother to buy her a purse and that gave him the idea to buy that purse to use as a bait. He attached to its zipper a modified device for delivering an electric shock against a robber. For this invention, he won the first prize of the national student's invention competition. He bought the purse for D, gave it to her whilst she was walking past the swimming pool on her way to feed a dog which she liked at a nearby house. When she tried to open it, she fell down on the ground. Its zipper was connected to an electric charge which was sufficiently strong to stun her. A was a top student who came from a family in which his mother was completely dedicated to scientific research and who from a young age taught him all about electronics because she had to give up her research career to raise A and wished that A might be the instrument for the fulfilment of her thwarted professional ambition. It seemed that A wanted to impress everybody with how clever he was and his experiment on D was part of his scheme to achieve fame. He wished to stun the world with his creative genius and in this case, he wanted his mother, who left his father after a quarrel,  to pay more attention to him. B joined him in the scheme merely because he was a student who was completely ordinary and was proud that he had been selected by the cleverest boy in the class to be his accomplice in the murder project. As the story developed, we discovered that the D did not die from the "lethal" electric charge of the purse but died of drowning. We were shown the messages on various computer screens of the students. We find that there are a lot of lies around for all sorts of reasons. Eventually, the mother of B was killed by B and A killed C because C guessed the real motive of B in killing D: that A had an Oedipus complex and wanted his mother to pay attention to him by seeing how "good" he was in inventing things. However, C herself had also certain morbid thought. She had collected all kinds of medicine which she thought might one day prove useful, perhaps in ending some one 's life including her own. In the event, A was made a fool of by X because she used the computer to impersonate A's mother. In a final attempt to draw his mother's attention, A thought of blowing up the whole school on the day that he would be honoured by the school for his prize winning essay on "Life and Death". The plan was however completely sabotaged by A. Death was not considered a price too high to pay.

What I like about this film, is not the credibility of the story but the skilful way the director was able to make use of different points of views of the heros of the movie to present a different psychological perspective on why D was killed. So the movie was a bit like a mix between the conventional detective thriller and the cubist way of presenting the psychological motives behind various characters doing various things, but always through the distorting mirror of the mind of the different characters. In this respect, the film was rather like the great Japanese classic Rashomon. The gradual unfolding of the story through the successive "confessions" of different characters helps keep the suspense going and helps also to give a complexity of to the film as the plot thickens with each new revelation. We never cease to ask, what will happen next. And our queries are answered by the revelations of more and more layers of truth, each deeper and more surprising and unanticipated than the last, in a way analogous to the layers of the union being gradually peeled off. This is my very first Nakashima film. He is a director whose future film it may well be worth watching out for.

Leaving aside for the moment of the question of the plausibility of the characters doing what they did, the story does proceed from climax to climax as more and more aspects of the murder came to light as a result of the disclosures made in the the course of the film. The length to which the different characters will go to obtain what they most desire, eg. love, revenge, fame or the desire to avoid shame and deal with guilt, power, the need for one's worth as a human being to be acknowledged by others etc may seem a bit excessive but the tension of the story was very well controlled by the director. I also like the music, a mix of Beatles songs, contemporary Japanese pop and the baroque piano music of Bach and occasionally some rap. The music provides a suitable backdrop to the sombre emotional tales being told. The apparent calm and rationality of the baroque music help to highlight and to heighten the bizarre depths of the human perversity portrayed in the film. I will not disclose here too much of who said what to whom where and what may be the possible motives of the various characters in doing what they did or I will spoil the fun for those who wish to see the film. I also like the photography,which is alway shot with medium shots with almost no panning at all. The composition of the screen images are always very studied, almost formal, as if they were still photographs. It seems that the director wishes us to concentrate on what the characters within the frame of the screen are doing and prefer to keep the narrative point of view through the lens of the camera as neutral as possible, as if it were just a documentary. I like the image of A making a clock which runs backward, second by second: an objective correlative of his desire to restore the lost love of his mother. I also like the constant images of the clouds in the context of a sunset. From time to time, the director will let us have shots of the clouds in the sky. But they always appear more or less the same, with a slight tinge of orange against a darkening blue sky.  Is the director trying to suggest that no matter what the characters are doing, someone perhaps a supernatural being or a supernatural power, is watching and will somehow ensure that every one gets what they deserve? Is he suggesting what LaoTzu is saying, that the universe is not merciful and treat human beings as straw dog used in ancestral worship? Is he suggesting what Shakespeare is suggesting: as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.Is the director trying to tell us that beneath the surface calm and orderliness of Japanese society, there lurk all kinds of dissatisfactions, dark unsatisfied needs which cannot find any resolution except in violence, physical and psychological, to the ultimate extent of death and murders. The film ends with some spetacular photography: everything being blown to pieces with objects flying about with at tremendous speed, all the fragments of the past in the lives of the various characters being merged in a gigantic chaos hurtling across the screen amidst a sound like the rumbling of an exploding volcano, in complete contrast to the static frames of all the previous scenes, like the paroxysm of the final outburst of sound in a Shastakovich symphony. Was it real or did it occur only in the mind of the A?  Certainly not a waste of anybody's time, including mine.