Akarui mirai

Kyoshi Kurosawa is becoming one of my favorite current filmmakers, and the further he gets from conventional horror and shock, the better I think he is.

Deeper meanings mingle with absurdist humor, and the kind of chance occurrences that enliven the fiction of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami also figure heavily in Kurosawa's films; cinematically, everything from Lynch or Fellini to Don Siegel can be a touchstone for further exploration.

BRIGHT FUTURE is like an improved CHARISMA - more refined, less loony, and considerably more poetic, but K Kurosawa's many concerns - trashing of the environment, a sense of depersonalization (and discreet nihilism) in younger/future generations, the erosion of a society's cohesiveness (especially when that erosion originates within, and not from some external source) - are handled very well - the last shot offers his darkest humor, with the cross-generational understanding becoming something quietly heroic evoking certain past masters of Japanese film. A sense that - if younger generations have drifted towards a nihilism that could destroy them or you, it is balanced by an equally withering take on the older generations that somehow let them down; this film in many ways visualizes the idea of getting over it, and moving on with life (after presenting some of the consequences for not doing so).

Tadanobu Asano's presence here is somewhat hyped (definitely on the DVD cover), undoubtedly due to his ascendant global stardom, but his performance is eclipsed by co-stars Joe Odagiri and Tatsuya Fuji, who both deliver dynamic performances of great range and control.

Mysterious, poetic, open to many interpretations, and one of Kyoshi Kurosawa's finest.

"Bright Future (Akarui mirai)" feels very much like a Sam Shephard play, with its themes of stifling fathers and rebelling sons and sibling responsibility between brothers, all suffused with irrational violence.

There's even a continuing leitmotif of a cowboy Western musical riff when magic realism takes over from the unrelieved quotidian of men who work with the detritus of an almost post-apocalyptic-seeming society, from a laundry to an appliance recycling workshop, and condescended to by their biological and putative family members with more money and much nicer apartments.

The characters seem to need to strike out with either Raskolnikov-ian or manipulative acts of violence as existential acts to affect their environment ("acclimating to Tokyo" is how one character metaphorically puts it) to be sure they're alive or having an impact on the living.

The main characters, well-matched by Tadanobu Asano as the scarily manipulative brother figure and Jô Odagiri as his even more depressed acolyte, are so alienated that the rigid others around them assume they are developmentally disabled.

I'm quite sure I didn't get anywhere near all the Goddard-ian symbolism, from the production design of the characters' seedy living arrangements to the phosphorescent beauty of poisonous jellyfish, which are used beyond the frogs in "Magnolia" in entrancing and haunting images like Conrad's fascination of the abomination.

The conclusion seems hopeless in a clouded fade into "A Clockwork Orange"-like, thrill-seeking gang of aimless young men wearing Che T-shirts, with a brightly hypocritical pop song about the future playing on the soundtrack.

I never knew that Tokyo had so many interesting bridges and canals.

I haven't seen any other films written or directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa to know if I just saw a bad print or if the washed out, almost black-and-white, fuzzy digital-video-seeming look was intentional.

I can see the maddeningly inscrutable "Bright Future" serving as the subject for some poor film school student's dissertation in a course entitled "The Use of Enigma and Symbolism in Post-Modernist Cinema" or (if you prefer the vernacular) "What the Heck Was That Film All About Anyway?" For I am absolutely convinced that one could spend a full semester - at the very least - trying to fathom the various levels of meaning in this film and never come up with a thoroughly satisfactory answer at the end of that search. And here I've always thought Ingmar Bergman movies were a challenge!

Shot through with heavy doses of allegory and Magic Realism, "Bright Future" tells the story of a sullen, moody young man named Yuji, who works at a dull factory job with his close buddy, Mamoru. The latter owns a deadly Red Jellyfish that he keeps in a little tank at home. One day, he gives the jellyfish as a present to Yuji, telling him that he has decided to quit the job and move on to bigger and better things. But instead of doing that, Mamoru murders the boss and the boss' wife, with little or no explanation given as to motive. Mamoru is immediately arrested and charged with first degree murder. Meanwhile, in a fit of despair, Yuji turns over the tank, only to have the jellyfish slide through the cracks of the floor and somehow land in the Tokyo water system, where it miraculously proliferates to the point where the area is literally inundated with freshwater killer jellyfish. While all this is going on, Yuji begins to develop a close but tentative bond with Mamoru's father, who was pretty much estranged from his son before the murder. As Yuji gets more and more obsessed with finding the elusive jellyfish, he seems, paradoxically, to be coming to a greater sense of reality. Well, there's the "plot" in a nutshell; now it's your turn to try to figure it all out.

If none of this makes any sense to you, don't feel bad because it doesn't make any sense to me either. The best I can make of it is that Yuji is intended to represent the younger generation in modern day Japan - disconnected, rudderless, utterly lacking in motivation, purpose and goals, and prone to act out of ill-defined impulse rather than rationality and logic. And somehow, by committing the murder that Yuji is actually intending to do (though here again, we are given no preparation or motive to explain WHY he would do so), Mamoru sacrifices himself so that Yuji can be saved from his own spiritual ennui and set on the path towards a meaningful life, primarily by caring for this jellyfish, which is itself a symbol of tenacity and beauty.

Or perhaps not….

Despite the fact that the film will probably have you pulling your hair out in bewilderment and frustration, "Bright Future," for all its self-conscious pretentiousness, is actually a fairly intriguing film just on the level of its visuals and the relationships it develops among the various characters. It's very well directed and very well acted, and if you can get beyond the symbol-gazing, you may actually find yourself mesmerized by the experience.

And I will be expecting those dissertations on my desk bright and early tomorrow morning.

Bright Future is about a plot to populate the sewers of Tokyo with a glowing, poisonous jellyfish. So far, so good. There aren't too many movies about plots to populate the sewers of Tokyo with glowing, poisonous jellyfish that I know about. Although the movie has much to commend it, it is ultimately frustrating because characters are constantly doing things not because they make sense but because the filmmaker wants them to in order to advance the plot. Also, the movie has no real ending; it just….ends.

On the one hand, you might say that the movie doesn't have to make sense because it follows a dream logic and dreams don't always make sense. However, the best movies that follow a dream logic, such as Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, have an internal consistency. Actions make sense within the context of the movie. Also, The Exterminating Angel has one of the best endings in all of cinema.

I liked the themes of Bright Future: loneliness, alienation, lack of connection between the generations. I also liked the poisonous jellyfish as a metaphor for disaffected, violent teenagers and 20-somethings. However, I had the feeling that the filmmaker wrote himself into a corner and didn't know how to get out of it. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami does this with his novels. He starts a novel not knowing where it's going but then eventually has to end it, which he almost always does in an unsatisfying manner.

Nevertheless, I keep reading Murakami novels and I'm going to seek out other films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Maybe some day all the ingredients will fall into place and he'll make a masterpiece.

Bright Future, another recent dark film from the great Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, focuses on working class folks whose future is anything but bright. The irony of the title is pounded home in scene after scene. Yuji and Mamoru, friends in their 20s who work at the same boring job in the same dull warehouse, are both frustrated with their lives. But there is a big difference.

While Mamoru looks around carefully and gives Yuji knowing glances, and tells Yuji when to Wait and when to Go Ahead (capital letters used on purpose), Yuji is content to live in his dreams in which, he says in a voice-over, he sees himself as having a bright future. Mamoru has a pet poisonous jellyfish, which he bequeaths to Yuji when something terrible happens and Mamoru lands in prison.

Their boss, a man of 55, is just as frustrated with his boring existence as his two workers, and Mamoru's father is, as well, a man who labors at a thankless job that keeps him confined to a small space; he fixes broken appliances in a salvage shop.

When the jellyfish escapes from Yuji, he panics, then relaxes when he realizes that it is, in essence, following him wherever he goes. Kurosawa always fuses fantasy with reality in his films and this one is no exception. Although an obvious symbol for escape from a humdrum existence, the jellyfish turns out to be something more than that as well. This is brought home later in the film when we see a flotilla of the things moving out to sea in the Tokyo canal...

KK, as I like to call him--to distinguish him from Akira Kurosawa--makes films like no one else today. It's easy and at the same time intriguing to read into his films more than what we see and chances are that the added meanings we find are right. I think we know this because his films resonate long after leaving the theater; the layers of meaning we find in them continue to make themselves apparent without much effort at all.

Bright Future is a film about significantly more than people who spend their time, their lives in futile activity. It's about whether or not we think about how to live our lives, about whether we value the time that we have, or how we value it, if we do at all. It's about how we try to move beyond what we have and how that usually fails. It's a sad film but one that upon reflection makes us think that maybe there is, after all, a chance for a bright future. Or maybe not.