Fantasia Fest runs from July 11th to August 1st, 2019. For more information, click here.
Based on a 1996 manga by Kyoko Okazaki, Chiwawa is the newest film written and directed by Ken Ninomiya, screening this week as part of the Fantasia Film Festival. With a great young cast lead by Mugi Kadowaki, you have such amazing veterans as Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer) and Chiaki Kuriyama (Battle Royale) rounding out this great ensemble for this powerful story. Ken Ninomiya has taken the source material and adapted it into a hybrid of Twin Peaks and Spring Breakers that feels like it’s more authentic that it should be. The film, like its namesake, hits some amazing heights, while showing us all the devastating lows as well.
The film begins with the grisly news report about the death of Chiwawa, a young woman found dismembered and wrapped in plastic in Tokyo Bay. The media of course plays up the more salacious elements surrounding the young girl’s past when her friend Miki (Mugi Kadowaki) is approached by a journalist, Yuko (Chiaki Kuriyama). Yuko is trying to get to the bottom of what happened to the young model and hopefully paint a more realistic portrait of her life. The film then flashes back and flashes forward as Miki begins to interview the friends in the circle who knew the enigmatic Chiwawa to try and unravel the mystery of what actually happened to her. We soon find out the people she considered friends didn’t really know the young woman as well as they thought they did. As the layers are pulled away one by one to shed a bit of light on the young girl, we find possessing that indescribable “it” factor was the reason for her fame and possibly her death.
Similar to Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, Chiwawa is about how this beautiful and somewhat damaged young woman influenced and affected the lives of those around her, who loved her, were jealous of her, and wanted to be her. As she moves from modeling to the sex industry, the film is very careful not to get lost in the details and instead focuses on how those around her try to make sense of Chiwawa’s choices, while not condemning her for them. This all transpires in a neon-washed Tokyo dreamscape that sometimes borders on the surreal, which is very reminiscent of Spring Breakers. The film even opens with a great robbery set piece as Chiwawa and company steal $55,000 from some politicians in a nightclub full of patrons, who then chase them through the streets of Tokyo. We get many points of views here, but not Chiwawa’s. I think Ken Ninomiya was smart to do that, because no matter how much Fire Walk With Me tried to explain the inner workings of Laura Palmer’s mind, maybe it was best we didn’t know.
Chiwawa is unflinching in its portrait, and I think that is why it’s so captivating. The film also sometimes shows two or three different perspectives on events that play with the reliability of memory and how that is affected by the emotions of those recalling it. Ninomiya is able to craft this idea into story that is tragic and often times beautiful. Chiwawa is also an interesting commentary on not only this one woman’s life and how she was much more than the sum of her worst decisions, but how nothing is ever as cut and dried as it may seem. It’s not an easy concept to mold into a feature, but here it is almost executed flawlessly as the film deals with some pretty heavy ideas as well as executing a narrative that leaves the viewer with a lot to unpack when it ends, like all good films do.