Shin’ichirô Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead was one of the great magic tricks in recent cinema history, a bait-and-switch high concept horror-comedy that only grows more delightful the more you dig into its carefully constructed puzzle box structure.
Ueda’s latest film, Special Actors, for the most part does not concern itself with a similar kind of structural rug-pull. But once again Ueda has crafted a thoroughly entertaining and surprisingly moving paean to performance and storytelling, arguing convincingly that artists live lies in order to better understand their truth.
It helps that Ueda continues to couch his explorations of the artistic life and process in crackerjack comedies with plotting tighter than a snare drum, involving set-pieces of Rube Goldbergian complexity as dozens of dominoes crash simultaneously into perfect formation. Neat trick, that.
The most special of all actors is Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa), a young man struggling to overcome his crippling shyness and earn a living as an actor. Kazuto’s shyness isn’t just a personality bug: it’s an actual medical condition. Any confrontation he gets in, he’s in danger of seizing up and passing out. Miserable and alone, Kazuto spends his days obsessively squeezing a squishy ‘boob’ to relieve stress and obsessively watching his old VHS of “Rescueman” a crummy superhero show in which an indomitable caped hero easily handles every problem thrown his way.
Kazuto’s life takes a major turn when he witnesses a failed purse-snatching end with the assailant knocked out. When Kazuto goes to help the fallen man, he makes two wild discoveries: 1) The purse-snatcher is his younger brother and 2) He’s not really a purse-snatcher. Instead he’s a ‘Special Actor’, part of a troupe of benevolent con artists that can be hired to do ‘live’ acting and play out scenarios for a wide variety of clientele.
Some of the jobs are straightforward: Stand in a line to make a store seem popular, laugh loudly in a movie theater to make a film seem more popular, fake getting beat up so a dweeb on a date can look cool, etc. But the Special Actors agency also takes on more complex problems, using their skills to build elaborate scenarios to fool people out of self-destructive behavior.
Yes, it’s all a metaphor, but Ueda is too canny a writer/director to actually have anybody explain it loud.
Anyway, all this is preamble to the big job at the center of the movie: The Special Actors are approached by a young woman whose sister has been indoctrinated into a larcenous cult (think Scientology with the production values of your hometown’s public broadcasting) and will soon give away the inn that has belonged to their family for generations. It’s up to the actors to free the girl from the cult, a mission in which Kazuto will play a starring role.
Revealing any more of the plot beyond the set up would be sinful. Suffice to say that once again Ueda has built a game that contains multiple games within itself, and watching his characters plan and rehearse only for real-life to send plans scattering into chaos is every bit as fun as it was in One Cut of the Dead.
And as with that film, Ueda ties his larger game to an emotional journey that is as plainspoken and nakedly vulnerable as the rest of the film is twisty and considered. While the film does not wallow in the circumstances that led to Kazuto being such a walking wound of a human, there is enough there to leave you certain that this man is trying to dig his way out of very deep trauma, that these games of pretend are his only life-raft away from very real pain.
Kazuto’s condition becomes both the film’s most reliable chaos element (every scheme and gambit is in danger of falling apart at any second if he passes out) and the truly important stake at the heart of the film. Sure you want to see the villains exposed and the day saved, but what truly matters is that this guy learn to stand up for himself and move past all his doubt and fear.
How Ueda dramatizes that final release is an ecstatic payoff every bit as potent as the comedy bombshells set off during the last stretch of One Cut, the kind of perfect fusion of story/comedy/character/theme that seems miraculous in any movie and that he has now carried with seeming ease twice in a row.
If Special Actors has a failing, it’s that Ueda doesn’t seem to know when enough is enough this time out. He keeps pulling the rug out from under the viewer until it begins to feel like you’re never going to reach the floor. Like one of the Ocean’s 11 sequels, things get to a point where you might feel that the actors have so carefully planned for every disaster that there’s no real danger to the enterprise, which takes away from the manic delight of seeing professionals snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat.
The movie’s flat visual aesthetic may also prove something of a hurdle for viewers. While I enjoy the tactile feeling of both this film and One Cut of the Dead, the too-clean digital look can be off-putting. On the other hand, Ueda clearly has an appreciation for art that’s shoddy and held together by spirit gum and hope, and that’s reflected in the style.
If Special Actors is ultimately a shade too clever for its own good, grounding all its gamesmanship in Kazuto’s earnest struggle to take control of his mind and body back allows the film to feel like more than just an exercise in navel-gazing about the importance of performance and the arts. Special Actors is fully aware of itself as a playful fun time, but it is also cognizant of the ways in which play and fun can bring about real healing.
So look out for this one whenever it’s available, and in the meantime I look forward to Ueda’s next puzzle box.