by Victor Pryor
The New York Asian Film Fest runs from June 26 to July 11 in Manhattan. For showtimes and further details, click here.
It only takes a couple of minutes for Funuke, Show Some Love You Losers! to show its dark heart. In their attempt to protect a cat lounging in the middle of the street, an old married couple is hit by a truck.
The accident happens offscreen, represented by the sounds of screeching tires and crashing metal. So far, so subtle.
But then we cut to two tire tracks of blood. Then to a pool of blood with chunks of meat that used to be people floating on the surface.
Nothing else is the film quite approaches that level of gruesome, but the message comes across very clear: it’s hilarious when bad things happen to people.
In the aftermath of the accident, the surviving children, Shinji (Masatoshi Nagase) and Kiyomi (Aimi Satsukawa) find their lives thrown into disarray, which only gets worse with the arrival of the long-gone Sumika, the eldest daughter who is either a failed actress or quite possibly Satan.
Pretty much a 50/50 shot, really.
To be fair, Funuke portrays a world where pretty much everybody is a monster, or pathetic, or something in-between. Shinji is a mercurial coward; Hagino, an old classmate, is a perverted creep; the rest of the family are all two-faced gossips. Even the youngest daughter Kiyomi, who seems like a shy and quiet introvert, turns out to have a dark side of her own.
The closest thing the film has to a decent person is Machiko, who very much falls on the “pathetic” side of things.
A relentlessly positive and kind person in a world that is utterly without empathy, Machiko tries so hard to make the best of a terrible situation that after a while, it begins to look like its own very specific form of mental illness. And for her efforts, she is knocked around, nearly blinded, almost chokes to death on baked eel, and is constantly rejected by her husband (which on one hand is not so bad, because that dude is kind of garbage. But on the other, Machiko would really, really like to have sex…)
It’s… not a great life. But to her, having even this absolutely terrible family is better than being alone.
That this sort of Job-like suffering never gets old is due entirely to the deft writing by director Daihachi Yoshida, and the energetic, hilarious performance by Hiromi Nagasaku. She always allows Machiko her humanity, never allowing her to be just a punchline.
But really, all the actors are phenomenal here. As Machiko’s abusive husband, Masatoshi Nagase is equal parts pathetic and monstrous. At first, he just seems like a garden variety lazy asshole. But when the layers start getting peeled back, and we see his affection for Kiyomi and his fear of Sumika, we start to understand why he is the way he is, even as it remains impossible to forgive him his weaknesses.
Kiyomi proves equally complex. Quiet, asthmatic, and so inward she often seems catatonic, it seems impossible to see why Sumika takes a perverse pleasure in torturing her, far beyond the bounds of any normal sibling rivalry. But when we get to the truth behind that emnity, Kiyomi becomes a whole different person, and her reserved nature is revealed to be nothing more than the unsustainable pose of a person who is fighting against their true nature.
(Which, spoiler alert, is that of a comic book artist.)
But there can only be one star, and it’s Sumika. Even if Sumika’s whole thing is her total inability to become a star. Eriko Sato is utterly terrifying as one of the greatest villains I’ve seen in some time. An inhumanly selfish cretaure of bottomless need and pure wrath, Sumika’s failures as an actress eventually start to make a perverse kind of sense. How can she be an actress when she can’t even convincingly be a human being in the first place?
Sunika controls her family’s world in a way that makes her seem unstoppable. But ther moment she leaves that little bubble, she’s less than nothing. And her inability to accept that fundamental truth, her irrational need to prove to an uncaring world that she’s something she’s not finds a way to destroy almost everyone and everything in its path. She is a force of nature that you can’t take your eyes off of.
As bleak and despairing as all this may sound, it’s important to remember: this is, in fact, a comedy. There are some truly inventive, laugh-out-loud great gags here. And that’s not even getting into the subplot involving a delightfully airy-fairy film director (Kobumichi Tosa, hilarious) who becomes the target of Sumiko’s obsession.
The film carries a unique, ever shifting tone, one that’s modulated remarkably well. This is a sometimes very silly movie, that in the same instant it’s being silly, can draw blood.
Funuke is a very dark, very funny, intimate little movie about an a famalial apocalypse. It’s a sick joke, but as sick jokes go, it’s a very well-told one.