The New York Asian Film Festival takes place between June 29 and July 15 in Manhattan. For more information about upcoming films and events, click here.
During his funny, unexpectedly poignant, and deeply charming post film Q&A, Smokin’ On The Moon director Kurata Wolf made the following statement:
“We’re kind of fucked up people, but we’re still here.”
Honestly, that’s about as good a review of the film as anyone could manage; whatever I do from here on out is pretty much extraneous.
Then again: having sat through the film, even if I had known more about it going in, it still feels like it would have been pretty much impossible to guess how the film would end from the place at which it begins.
Perhaps more of a warning is in order.
To wit: the first image of the movie is a woman breastfeeding a baby.
The second image is (censored) footage of a woman delivering a very violent seeming blow job.
The opening credits, set to a deliciously tuneless piece of noise rock, include instances of satanic imagery, dead and mutilated fish, and the extremely graphic consumption of cooked rice.
What any of this has to do with the adventures of aimless, 34-year-old drug dealer Sota (Arata Iura) and his babyfaced pothead BFF Rakuto (a.k.a. ‘Punk Rooster’, played by Ryo Narita) is anybody’s guess.
As regular viewers of the gonzo end of Japanese cinema know full well, this sort of thing is completely par for the course. And the first twenty or so minutes of freewheeling vulgarity, full as they are of raunchy sexual encounters, drug fueled hi-jinks, broadly cartoony supporting characters and a seemingly nonstop barrage of homophobic jokes and sight gags (but more on that later), lead the audience to settle in for the type of anything goes offensive comedy that forces laughs out of you through sheer chutzpah alone.
But then the movie takes a deeply strange left turn and becomes something totally different.
There are hints before that, in a series of lovingly rendered animated sequences that are as beautiful in form as they are ugly in content. But even that can be chalked up to the sort of “anything goes” stylistic flourishes you’d expect from a first time filmmaker, who, as he indicated in his post film interview, never expected to get the chance to make a feature length film in the first place.
But what ultimately winds up happening is just so much stranger.
It turns from a gross cartoon to an extremely earnest drama about two friends with only occasional forays into the grotesque.
It’s impossible to articulate just how jarring this shift feels in context. I spent most of the next hour (the movie is nearly two hours, a far too indulgent length) growing increasingly impatient, unsure where all this was going. And only in the final fifteen minutes does it all come together (including, shockingly enough, the two opening shots) with back-to-back twists, one so seemingly random I had to rack my brain to recall if it had been set up earlier (RESULTS: INCONCLUSIVE) and the second incredibly maudlin.
It’s not entirely successful, but the fact that it comes within even spitting distance of working is due in large part to the efforts of Iura and Narita, who have an easy, lived in chemistry that brightens their every scene together.
Truth be told, my opinion of the film was raised by the post film Q&A with the director and some of the cast, where he revealed that the film was semi-autobiographical. In real life, he was Sota and his brother was Rakuto, and that knowledge lends a certain poignancy to the proceedings, as does the fact that actors Shaq and Magnum, whose characters Kiku and Kuma are the butt of much of the film’s seemingly homophobic gags, are in fact old friends of Wolf whom he put in the film as a tribute to their wild past and who improvised most of their scenes together.
All of this is context that the average would-be viewer most likely won’t have access to. And so the whole experience may well just come off as one ungainly, overly indulgent mess. Which… well, it pretty much is. But it’s not without its virtues, either. Even past Iura and Narita, the entire cast gives stellar performances. Jyonmyon Pei is a hoot as Kawamoto, a gleefully smarmy mobster; Yasu Peron as the tough talking wannabe B-Boy Jay crumbles under pressure with startling commitment; and Mary Sara is utterly heartbreaking as a junkie single mom that brings out a wholly unexpected side of Rakuto.
The performances are good enough to almost make one want to forgive the overall unruliness of the finished product.
Almost.
It’s safe to say that Smokin’ On The Moon doesn’t really work. But it’s a failure of execution, not ambition, and for that at least it deserves respect.
